LoL Universe Indexing and Search

As a youth, Pyke started out like many in Bilgewater: on the slaughter docks. All day, every day, monstrous creatures of the deep were hauled in for rendering in the butcheries that lined the waterfront. He found employment in a district known as Bloodharbor, as even the tide itself was not strong enough to wash away the red slick that ran constantly down its wooden slips.

He became well acquainted with the trade—both the gruesome work and meager paychecks. Over and over, Pyke watched heavy purses of gold being handed to captains and crews in exchange for the daunting carcasses that he and his fellows would hack into salable chunks. He became hungry for more than a few copper sprats in his pocket, and managed to talk his way onto a ship’s crew. Few individuals dared to hunt in the traditional Serpent Isles manner: launching themselves at their targets to secure tow-hooks with their bare hands, and beginning to butcher the creatures while they yet lived. Fearless and highly skilled in this regard, Pyke soon cut a name for himself as the best harpooner a golden kraken could buy. He knew meat was worth pennies compared to certain organs from the larger, more dangerous beasts… organs that needed to be harvested fresh.

Depending on the difficulty of the hunt, each sea monster commanded its own price, and the most desired by Bilgewater traders was the jaull-fish. From its razor-toothed maw, priceless sacs of sapphilite were coveted across Runeterra for various sorcerous distillations, and a small flask of the glowing blue oil could pay for a ship and its crew ten times over. But it was while hunting with an untested captain that Pyke learned where a life of blood and guts would land him.

Days into their journey, a huge jaull-fish breached, opening its maw wide to reveal rows of sapphilite sacs. Several harpoon lines secured the beast, and though it was far bigger and older than any he had encountered before, Pyke leapt into its mouth without hesitation.

As he set about his work, a deep vibration began to stir in the creature’s cavernous gullet. Roiling bubbles broke the ocean’s surface, and an entire pod of jaulls began to push against the tethered ship’s hull. The captain lost his nerve, and cut Pyke’s lifeline. The last thing the doomed harpooner saw before the beast’s jaws snapped shut was the look of horror on his crewmates’ faces, as they watched him being swallowed alive.

But this was not the end for Pyke.

In the deepest fathoms of the unknowable ocean, crushed by the titanic pressure, and still firmly trapped within the jaull’s mouth, he opened his eyes once more. There were blue lights everywhere, thousands of them, seemingly watching him. Tremulous echoes of something ancient and mysterious filled his brain, crushing his mind, showing him visions of all he had lost whilst others grew fat.

A new hunger overtook Pyke, one for vengeance and retribution. He would fill the depths with the corpses of those who had wronged him.

Back in Bilgewater, no one thought much of the killings at first—for so dangerous a place, the occasional red tide was nothing new. But weeks became months, and a pattern began to emerge. Captains from many ships were found carved up and left out for the dawn. Bar-room patrons whispered it was a supernatural killer, wronged at sea, gutting his way through the crew manifest of some damned ship called the Terror. Once a mark of respect and celebrity, the question “You a captain?” became a cause for alarm.

Soon it was the caulkers, too, and the first mates, merchant officers, bankers… indeed, anyone associated with the bloody business of the slaughter docks. A new name went up on the bounty boards: a thousand krakens for the infamous Bloodharbor Ripper.

Driven by memories twisted by the deep, Pyke has succeeded where many have failed—striking fear into the hearts of unscrupulous businessmen, killers, and seafaring scoundrels alike, even though no one can find any mention of a ship named the Terror ever docking in Bilgewater.

A city that prides itself on hunting monsters now finds a monster hunting them, and Pyke has no intention of stopping.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And for that, I must save them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope I’m not too late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snarling, Hayda and several acolytes charged forward.

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

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

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

Sometimes, to tell a story is to lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I will bear your story.

The Rat Town slaughter docks; they smell as bad as their name suggests.

And yet here I am, hidden in the shadows, breathing the blood-and-bile stink of butchered sea serpents.

I melt deeper into the darkness, pulling the brim of my hat down low over my face as heavily armed members of the Jagged Hooks stalk by.

They’ve got a reputation for savagery, these boys. In a fair fight, they might take me down, but I’m not big on playing fair, and I’m not here to fight. Not this time.

So what brings me here, to one of the foulest districts in Bilgewater?

Money. What else?

It was a gamble, taking on this job, but the payout is big enough that I couldn’t pass it up. And besides, I cased this place to stack the deck in my favor.

I don’t intend to linger. I want to be in and out as quickly and as quietly as possible. Once the job’s done, I aim to collect my payment and be gone before dawn. All goes well, I’ll be halfway to Valoran before anyone knows the damn thing’s missing.

The thugs turn the corner of the massive slaughter shed. Means I’ve got two minutes until they swing back around - plenty of time.

The silver moon slides behind a bank of clouds, covering the wharf in shadow. Crates from the day’s work are scattered across the dock. It makes for easy cover.

I see lookouts on top of the main warehouse, silhouettes standing watch, crossbows in hand. They’re gossiping loudly like fishwives. I could be wearing bells and these idiots still wouldn’t hear me.

They think no one would be fool enough to come here.

A bloated corpse hangs overhead, a warning for all to see. It spins slowly in the midnight breeze coming off the harbor. It’s an ugly sight. A huge hook, the type used to catch devilfish, holds the body aloft.

Stepping over rusted chains lying limp upon wet stone, I pass between a pair of towering cranes. They’re used to haul giant sea creatures into the slaughter sheds for butchering. It’s those looming factories that are the source of the gods-awful stench that permeates everything here. I’m gonna need to buy myself a new set of clothes once this is over.

Across the bay, past the chum-churned waters of the slaughter docks, scores of ships lie at anchor, their lanterns swaying gently. One of the vessels draws my eye; a massive, black-sailed war galleon. I know whose ship that is. Everyone in Bilgewater knows.

I take a moment to gloat. I’m about to steal from the most powerful man in town. There’s always a certain thrill that comes from spitting in death’s eye.

As expected, the main warehouse is locked up tighter than a noblewoman’s virtue. Guards posted at every entrance. Doors locked and barred. For anyone other than me, it would be impossible to break into.

I duck into a blind alley opposite the warehouse. It’s a dead end, and it’s not as dark as I’d have liked. If I’m still here when the patrol comes back, they will see me. And if they get ahold of me, the best I can hope for is a quick death. More likely, I’ll be taken to him... and that would be a far more painful, drawn out way to go.

The trick, as always, is not to get caught.

Then I hear them. The bruisers are returning early. I have seconds, at best. I snap a card from my sleeve and weave it through my fingers; it’s as natural as breathing. This is the easy part, the rest can’t be rushed.

I let my mind drift as the card starts to glow. Pressure builds around me, and I’m nearly overcome with the promise of everywhere. Half-closing my eyes, I focus, and picture where I need to be.

Then, there’s the familiar lurch in the guts as I shift. A displacement of air, and I’m inside the warehouse. Gone with barely a trace.

Damn, I’m good.

One of the Jagged Hooks outside might glance up the alley and notice a single playing card falling to the ground, but probably not.

It takes a moment for me to get my bearings. Dim light from the lanterns outside creeps in through the cracks in the walls. My eyes adjust.

The warehouse is crowded, stacked high with treasures from all over the Twelve Seas: gleaming suits of armor, exotic works of art, shining silks. All things of considerable value, but not what I’m here for.

My attention is drawn to the loading doors at the front of the warehouse, where I know I’ll find the most recent arrivals. I run my fingertips across the various cartons and crates... until I come to a small, wooden box. I can feel the power emanating from within. This is what I’m here for.

I unlatch the lid.

My prize is revealed; a knife of exquisite design, lying upon a bed of black velvet. I reach for it—

Chh-chunk.

I freeze. There’s no mistaking that sound.

Before he even speaks, I know who’s standing behind me in the darkness.

“T.F.,” says Graves. “It’s been a long time.”

I’ve been here for hours. Some folks might get bored standing still this long, but I’ve got my anger to keep me company. I ain’t leaving this spot until I settle the score.

Long after midnight, the snake finally shows. He suddenly appears in the warehouse, using that same old magic trick. I prime my shotgun, ready to turn him inside out. After years spent looking for that treacherous son of a bitch here he is, dead to rights at the end of Destiny’s barrels.

“T.F.,” I say. “It’s been a long time.”

I had better words ready for this moment. Funny how they all went out the window as soon as I saw him.

But T.F.? His face shows nothing. No fear, no regret, no hint of surprise. Not even while facing down a loaded gun. Gods damn him.

“Malcolm, how long have you been standing there?” he asks, the smile in his voice enrages me.

I take aim. I can pull the trigger and leave him deader than sea scum.

I should.

Not yet, though. I need to hear him say it. “Why’d you do it?” I ask, knowing full well he’ll just come back with something clever.

“Is the gun really necessary? I thought we were friends.”

Friends. The bastard’s mocking me. Now I want to tear his smug head off – but I’ve got to keep my cool.

“You’re looking as dapper as ever,” he says.

I look down at the devilfish bites on my clothes. I had to swim to get past the guards. Ever since he got a little money, T.F.’s been a stickler for appearance. I can’t wait to mess him up. But first, I want answers.

“Tell me why you left me to take the fall, or they’ll be pickin’ bits of your pretty face out of the rafters.” This is how you’ve got to be with T.F. Give him room, and he’ll pull your strings ‘til you don’t know which end’s your ass.

His slipperiness came in handy when we were partners.

“Ten damn years in the Locker! Know what that does to a man?”

He doesn’t. For once, he’s got nothing cute to say. He knows he did me wrong.

“They did things to me that would’ve driven most men mad. All that kept me from breaking was my anger. And thinking about this moment, right here.”

Then comes the clever reply: “Sounds like I kept you alive. Maybe you should thank me.”

That one gets me. I’m so mad, I can barely see. He’s trying to goad me. Then, when I’m blind with rage, he’ll do his little disappearing act. I take a breath and leave the bait alone. He’s surprised I ain’t biting. This time, I’m getting answers.

“How much did they pay you to sell me out?” I growl.

T.F. stands there, smiling, just trying to buy some time.

“Malcolm, I’ll be happy to have this conversation with you, but this really isn’t a good time or place.”

Almost too late, I notice the card dancing through his fingers. I snap out of it and squeeze the trigger.

BLAM.

His card’s gone. Almost took his damn hand off, too.

“Idiot!” he barks. I finally made him lose his cool. “You just woke up the whole damned island! Y’know whose place this is?”

I don’t care.

I ready a second shot. I barely see his hands move, then cards explode all around me. I fire back, not sure if I want him dead or just almost dead.

Before I can find him again in the smoke, fury, and splintering wood, a door gets kicked open.

A dozen thugs come roaring in, just to add to the damn mess.

“So, do you really want to do this?” T.F. asks, ready to throw another fistful of cards at me.

I nod, and hold my gun steady on him.

It’s time to settle up.

Things get ugly. Fast.

The whole damned warehouse is crawling with Jagged Hooks, but Malcolm couldn’t care less. I’m all he’s interested in.

I sense Graves’s next shot coming and turn away. The boom of his gun is deafening. A box explodes where I’d been a fraction of a second earlier.

I do believe my old partner is trying to kill me.

Somersaulting over a stack of mammoth ivory, I whip a trio of cards in his direction. Before they hit home, I’m already ducking into cover, looking for an out. I only need a few seconds.

He curses loudly, but the cards won’t do more than slow him down. He’s always been a tough bastard. Stubborn, too. Never knows when to let things go.

“You ain’t gettin’ away, T.F,” he growls. “Not this time.”

Yep, that trait’s still riding him hard.

He’s wrong, though — as usual. I’ll be taking my leave as soon as possible. There’s no use talking to him when he’s out for blood.

Another blast, and shrapnel ricochets off a priceless suit of Demacian armor, embedding into the walls and floor. I dart left and right, weaving and feinting, sprinting from cover to cover. He sticks with me, roaring his threats and accusations, his shotgun barking in his hands. Graves moves fast for a big man. I’d almost forgotten that.

He’s not my only problem. The damned fool’s stirred up a hornet’s nest with all his shooting and hollering. The Jagged Hooks are all over us, but they’re smart enough to leave some men barring the main doors.

I have to get gone — but I’m not leaving without what I came for.

I’ve led Graves on a merry dance around the warehouse, and I arrive back where we started a moment before he does. There are Hooks between me and my prize, and more coming, but there’s no time to wait. The card in my hand glows red, and I hurl it dead center of the warehouse doors. The detonation blows them off their hinges and scatters the Hooks. I move in.

One of them recovers faster than I expect, and he swings at me with a hatchet. I sway around the blow and kick out his knee, hurling another spread of cards at his friends to keep them honest.

My path clear, I swipe the ornate dagger I’ve been hired to steal, hooking it onto my belt. After all this trouble, might as well get paid.

The gaping loading doors beckon, but there are too many damned Hooks piling in. There’s no way out there, so I make for the only quiet corner left in this madhouse.

A card is dancing in my hand as I prepare to shift, but as I start to drift away, Graves appears, stalking me like a rabid bear. Destiny bucks in his grip, and a Jagged Hook is shot to tatters.

Graves’s glare is drawn to the card glowing in my hand. He knows what it means, and swings the smoking barrels of his gun at me. I’m forced to move, interrupting my concentration.

“Can’t run forever,” he bellows after me.

For once, he’s not stupid. He’s not giving me the time I need.

He’s keeping me off my game, and the thought of being taken down by these Hooks is starting to weigh on me. Their boss is not known for his mercy.

Among the dozen other thoughts rattling around my head is the nagging feeling that I’ve been set up. I’m thrown an easy job out of nowhere, a big score just when I need it most - and surprise, there’s my old partner standing there waiting for me. Someone a lot smarter than Graves is playing me for a fool.

I’m better than this. I’d kick myself for being sloppy, but there’s a dock full of goons waiting to save me the trouble.

Right now, all that matters is getting the hell away from here. Two blasts from that damned gun of Malcolm’s send me scurrying. My back slams against a dusty wooden crate. A crossbow bolt lodges in the rotted wood behind me, just inches from my head.

“No way out, sunshine,” Graves yells.

I look around and see fire from the explosion starting to spread to the roof. He may have a point.

“We’ve been sold out, Graves,” I shout.

“You’d know all about that,” he replies.

I try reasoning with him.

“We work together, we can get out of this.”

I must be desperate.

“I’d see us both dead before I trust you again,” he snarls.

I didn’t expect anything else. Talking sense to him just makes him angrier, which is exactly what I need. The distraction buys me just enough time to shift outside the warehouse.

I can hear Graves roaring inside. No doubt he just rounded on my spot only to find me gone, a single card on the ground, taunting him.

I launch a barrage of cards through the loading doors behind me. It’s long past time for subtlety.

I feel bad for a moment about leaving Graves in a burning building - but I know it won’t kill him. He’s too stubborn for that. Besides, a fire on the docks is a serious deal in a port town. It might buy me some time.

As I search for the quickest way off the slaughter docks, the sound of an explosion makes me look over my shoulder.

Graves appears, stepping through the hole he’s just blown out the side of the warehouse. He’s got murder in his eyes.

I tip my hat to him and run. He comes after me, shotgun booming.

I have to admire the man’s determination.

Hopefully it won’t kill me tonight.

The young urchin’s eyes were wide and panicked as he was led toward the captain’s quarters.

It was the agonized screams emanating from the door at the end of the passageway that gave him second thoughts. The cries echoing through the claustrophobic decks of the enormous, black warship were heard by every crewman aboard the Dead Pool — as intended.

The first mate, his face a web of scars, rested a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder. They came to a halt before the door. The child winced as another tortured wail issued from within.

“Steady,” said the first mate. “The captain’ll want to hear what you’ve got to say.”

With that, he rapped sharply on the door. It was opened a moment later by a hulking brute with facial tattoos and a broad, curved blade strapped across his back. The boy didn’t hear the words spoken between the two men; his gaze was locked on the heavyset figure seated with his back to him.

He was a big man, the captain, and of middling years. His neck and shoulders were thick and bullish. His sleeves were rolled up, and his forearms slick with blood. A red greatcoat hung from a peg nearby, alongside his black tricorne.

“Gangplank,” breathed the urchin, his voice thick with fear and awe.

“Captain, I figured you’d want to hear this,” said the mate.

Gangplank said nothing, nor did he turn, still intent as he was on his work. The scarred sailor nudged the boy forward. He stumbled before he caught his footing and shuffled closer. The child approached the captain of the Dead Pool as he would a cliff’s edge. His breath quickened as he caught full sight of the captain’s work.

Basins of bloody water sat upon Gangplank’s desk, along with an array of knives, hooks, and gleaming surgical implements.

A man lay upon the captain’s workbench, bound tightly with leather straps. Only his head was free. He looked around in wild desperation, neck straining, his face covered with sweat.

The boy’s gaze was inexorably drawn to the man’s flayed left leg. The urchin suddenly realized he couldn’t remember what he came here to do.

Gangplank turned from his work to stare at the visitor. His eyes were as cold and dead as a shark’s. He held a slender blade in one hand, delicately poised between his fingers, like a fine paintbrush.

“It’s a dying art, scrimshaw,” said Gangplank, his attention returning to his work. “Few have the patience for carving bone these days. It takes time. See? Every cut has a purpose.”

Somehow, the man was still alive, despite the ragged wound in his leg, the skin and flesh peeled back from his thighbone. Transfixed with horror, the lad saw the intricate designs the captain had carved upon that bone; coiling tentacles and waves. It was delicate work, beautiful even. That just made it even more terrible.

Gangplank’s living canvas sobbed.

“Please...” he moaned.

Gangplank ignored the pathetic plea and set down his knife. He splashed a cup of cheap whiskey over his work, clearing it of blood. The man’s scream threatened to rip his own throat out, until he slumped into merciful unconsciousness, his eyes rolling back in his head. Gangplank grunted in disgust.

“Remember this, boy,” Gangplank said. “Sometimes, even those who are loyal forget their place. Sometimes, it’s necessary to remind them. Real power is all about how people see you. Look weak, even for a moment, and you’re done.”

The child nodded, his face now drained of color.

“Wake him,” said Gangplank, gesturing toward the unconscious crewman. “The whole crew needs to hear his song.”

As the ship’s surgeon stepped forward, Gangplank swung his gaze back to the child.

“Now,” he said. “What did you want to tell me?”

“A... a man,” said the boy, his words faltering. “A man on the Rat Town docks.”

“Go on,” Gangplank said.

“He was tryin’ not to be seen by the Hooks. But I seen him.”

“Mm-hmm,” Gangplank muttered as he began to lose interest. He turned back to his work.

“Keep goin’, lad,” the first mate urged.

“He was playing around with some fancy deck of cards. They glowed funny.”

Gangplank stood up from his chair, like a colossus rising from the depths.

“Tell me where,” he said.

The leather belt of his holster creaked in his tightening grip.

“By the warehouse, the big one near the sheds.”

Gangplank’s face flushed an angry shade of crimson as he pulled on his greatcoat and claimed his hat from its peg. His eyes glinted red in the lamplight. The child was not alone in taking a wary step back.

“Give the boy a silver serpent and a hot meal,” the captain ordered to his first mate as he strode purposefully toward the cabin door.

“And get everyone to the docks. We’ve got work to do.”

I’m coughin’ up black. The smoke from the warehouse fire is tearin’ my lungs to shreds, but I don’t have time to catch my breath. T.F.’s getting away, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna spend another dog’s age chasin’ him all over Runeterra. It ends tonight.

The bastard sees me coming. He shoves a couple of dock hands out of the way and runs off across the wharf. He’s trying to work his escape card, but I’m keeping the heat on him, so he can’t focus.

More Hooks swarm around, like flies on an outhouse. Before they can block his path, T.F. tosses a couple of his exploding cards and takes the thugs out. A few Hooks are an easy fight for him. But I ain’t. I’m comin’ to get my due, and T.F. knows it. He scurries down the wharf as fast as he can.

His scuffle with the dock boys gives me just enough time to catch up. He sees me and darts behind a huge hunk of whale spine. A blast from my gun shatters his cover, filling the air with shards of bone.

He answers by trying to take my head off, but I shoot his card in midair. It explodes like a bomb, knocking us both on our asses. He scrambles to his feet first and takes off. I fire Destiny as fast as she’ll shoot.

Some Hooks close in on us with chains and cutlasses. I turn quick and blow their insides out their backs. Before I can hear the wet slap of their guts on the dock, I’m spinning on my heels. I take aim at T.F., but I’m clipped by a shot from a pistol. More Hooks, and these are better armed.

I duck behind a piece of an old trawler’s hull to return fire. My gun just clicks. Gotta reload. I slam some fresh shells into the cylinder, spit my anger onto the floor, and wade back into the chaos.

All around me, shots and bolts burst through wooden crates. One of ’em tears a chunk of my ear off. I just grit my teeth and plow forward, squeezing the trigger. Destiny is chewin’ up everything. One Jagged Hook loses a jaw. Another is blasted into the bay. A third gets torn into a red sheet of muscle and sinew.

I snap around to find T.F. escaping deeper into the slaughter docks. I run past a fishmonger hanging up scavenger eels. One of the beasts is just skinned, its innards still spillin’ onto the dock. The monger turns on me, swinging a meat hook.

BOOM.

I take off his leg.

BOOM.

I follow up with a shot to his head.

I shove away a stinking razorfish carcass and keep moving. The blood is ankle deep, some of it from the fish and some from the Hooks we’ve gunned down. It’s enough to give a dandy like T.F. fits. Even with me on his tail, he slows his stride to keep from messin’ up his skirts.

Before I can close in, T.F. kicks on into a gallop. I can feel myself losing wind.

“Turn and face me!” I holler.

What kind of man don’t own up to his problems?

A noise to my right draws my attention to a balcony holding two more Hooks. I fire, and the whole thing crashes to the docks.

The gun smoke and debris are so thick, I can’t see a damn thing. I run toward the sound of his lady boots thudding across the wooden slats. He’s makin’ for Butcher’s Bridge at the end of the slaughter docks - the only way off the island. Damned if I’m letting him get away again.

As I reach the bridge, T.F. skids to a halt, halfway across. At first, I think he’s given up. Then I see why he stopped: On the far side, blocking his way, there’s a mass of sword-wielding bastards. But I ain’t backing down.

T.F. turns back only to find me. He’s trapped. He looks over the side of the bridge, down at the water. He’s thinking about jumping - but I know he won’t.

He’s all out of options. He starts walking toward me.

“Look, Malcolm. Neither of us needs to die here. As soon as we get out of this-”

“You’ll run again. That’s all you’ve ever done.”

He don’t answer. Suddenly, he ain’t so worried about me. I turn back to see what he’s fixed on.

Behind me, I see every lowlife that can carry a blade or pistol storming onto the docks. Gangplank must’ve called in all his boys from across the city. To keep going’s a death sentence.

But livin’ ain’t the most important thing to me today.

They’re in no rush, the Hooks. Not anymore. They know they have us trapped. Behind them, it looks like every rat-stabbing cutthroat in Bilgewater has shown up to the party. No way back.

On the far end of the bridge, blocking my escape into the maze of Bilgewater’s slums, is what appears to be the whole Red Caps dock gang. They rule the east side of the waterfront. Gangplank owns them, just like he owns the Hooks and nearly the whole damned town.

Behind me, there’s Graves, stomping ever closer. The stubborn son of a bitch doesn’t care about the mess we’re in. It’s amazing, really. Here we are, yet again, like all those years ago. Deep in the muck, and he just won’t listen.

I wish I could tell him what really happened back then, but there’s no point. He wouldn’t believe me, not for a second. Once something’s lodged in that thick skull of his, it takes a while to shake it loose. And we don’t have a while.

I back up to the side of the bridge. Over the rail, I see the winches and pulleys suspended beneath me - then the ocean far below. My head spins, and my stomach drops into my boots. As I stagger back to the middle of the bridge, I get a full view of how bad a spot I’m in.

Looming in the distance is Gangplank’s black-sailed ship. From it, a damned armada of boats is closing in below, rowing hard. Looks like all of his men are heading our way.

I can’t get through the Hooks, I can’t get through the Caps, and I can’t get through Graves’s pig-headedness.

Only one way to go.

I step up onto the railing of the bridge. We’re even higher than I realized. The wind whips at my coat, making it snap like the sails of a ship. I should never have come back to Bilgewater.

“Get the hell down from there,” says Graves. Is there a hint of desperation in his voice? It’d break him if I died before he got the confession he wants so much.

I take a deep breath. It really is a long way down.

“Tobias,” Malcolm says. “Step back.”

I pause. I haven’t heard that name in a long time.

Then I jump from the bridge.

The Brazen Hydra was one of the few taverns in Bilgewater that didn’t have sawdust on the floor. Drinks were rarely spilled, let alone teeth, but on this night, its patrons could be heard all the way to Diver’s Bluff.

Men of some repute, and even greater means, were turning the air blue with wondrous songs of the very worst acts.

And there, in the middle of them all, was the conductor of the night’s revelry.

She twirled, toasting the health of the harbor master and all his watchmen. Her lustrous red hair whipped around, captivating the eyes of every man in the room, not that they had been looking at anything other than her.

No glass had been allowed to run empty all night - the crimson-haired siren made sure of that. But it wasn’t the dulled senses of every man in the room that drew them closer. It was the promise of her next glorious smile.

With merriment still shaking the tavern, the front door opened, and in stepped a plainly dressed man. Inconspicuous to a degree that only comes from years of practice, he walked to the bar and ordered a drink.

Among the clumsily assembled gallery, the young woman grabbed a fresh glass of amber ale.

“My fine fellows, I’m afraid I must take my leave,” she said with a flourish.

The men of the harbor guard responded with loud bellows of protest.

“Now, now. We’ve had our fun,” she said, chiding them amiably. “But I have a busy night ahead, and you are all so very late to your posts.”

She hopped onto a table without missing a beat, before looking down upon them all with triumphant glee.

“May the Mother Serpent grant us mercy for our sins!”

She smiled her most captivating smile, raised the large tankard to her lips, and then downed her ale in one tremendous gulp.

“Especially the big ones,” she said, as she slammed her glass on the table.

She wiped the beer from her mouth to a rapturous roar of approval and blew a kiss to all.

Like servants before their queen, the room parted.

The door was held open for her by the gracious harbor master. He hoped to garner one last glance of approval, but she was lost to the streets before he could look up from his unsteadily courteous bow.

Outside, the moon had dipped behind Freeman’s Aerie, and the night’s shadow seemed to reach out to meet the woman. Each step that she took from the tavern became more purposeful and surefooted. Her carefree veil dissolved, and her true self was revealed.

Her smile, her look of wonder and joy, were gone. She stared grimly, not seeing the streets and alleys around her, but looking far beyond to the many possibilities of the dark night ahead.

Behind her, the plainly dressed man from the tavern was gaining. His footsteps were silent, yet unnervingly swift.

In a measured heartbeat, he put his stride in perfect unison with hers, just off her shoulder, out of her periphery.

“Is everything in place, Rafen?” she asked.

After all these years, he was still taken aback at how he could never surprise her.

“Yes, Captain,” he said.

“You weren’t spotted?”

“No,” he bristled, reining in his displeasure at the question. “The bay was free from the harbor master’s eyes, and the ship was as good as empty.”

“And the boy?”

“He played his part.”

“Good. We meet at the Syren.”

At her word, Rafen broke away and disappeared into the gloom.

She continued onward as the night wrapped itself around her. Everything was in motion. All that remained was for her players to begin the show.

I hear Graves roar as I dive off the bridge. All I can see is the rope beneath me. No need to think about the fall or the bottomless black depths.

Everything is a blur of rushing wind.

I nearly scream with joy when I catch the rope, but then it burns into my palm like a branding iron. My fall stops with a snap as I slide to the bottom of the looping tether.

I hang there a moment, cursing.

I’ve heard that dropping into water from this height normally won’t kill a man, but I’d rather take my chances on the stone loading dock that’s at least fifty feet straight down. I’ll die, but it’s a damned sight better than drowning.

Between me and the stone platform, a pair of heavy-duty cables run from here to the mainland, one forward, one back. Crude, noisy mechanisms power them. They’re used to transport rendered down parts of sea beasts to the markets in Bilgewater proper.

The cables strum as a heavy rusted bucket, as big as a house, grinds its way toward me.

I let a smile creep on my face for a second. That is, until I see what’s in the cart. I’m about to drop feet first into a seething vat of rotting fish spleen.

It took me months to earn the coin for my boots. Supple as gossamer and sturdy as tempered steel, they were crafted from the hide of an abyssal sea drake. There are fewer than four pairs in the whole world.

Damn it.

I time my jump just right and land in the middle of the chum bucket. The cold slop seeps through every hand-stitch of my prized boots. At least my hat’s clean.

Suddenly, I hear that damned gun bark again.

The mooring line explodes.

The cart groans as it slides free from the cables. The wind’s knocked out of me as the bucket slams into the stone platform. I feel the foundations of the dock shake before everything flips on its side.

The world falls over my head, along with a ton of fish guts.

Struggling to stand, I look for another way out. Gangplank’s launches are closing in. They’re nearly here.

Dazed, I drag myself toward a small boat moored on the loading dock. I’m not halfway there when a shotgun blast rips its hull wide open, scuttling it.

As the boat sinks, I drop to my knees, exhausted. I try to catch some breath over my own stench. Malcolm stands over me. Somehow, he made his way down, too. Of course he did.

“Not so charmin’ now, are ya?” Graves grins, looking me up and down.

“Are you ever gonna learn?” I say, rising to my feet. “Every time I try to help you, I-”

He fires into the ground in front of me. I’m pretty sure I get a chunk of something in my shin. “If you’d just list-”

“Oh, I’m all done listenin’,” he interrupts, grinding out the words. “The biggest score of our lives, and before I knew it, you were gone.”

“Before you knew it? I told you-”

Another blast, another shower of stone, but I’m past caring.

“I tried to get us out. The rest of us saw the job was going south,” I say. “But you wouldn’t back down. You never do.” The card’s in my hand before I realize it.

“I told you then, all you had to do was back me up. We would’ve gotten out clean – and rich. But you ran,” he says, stepping forward. The man I used to know seems lost under years of hatred.

I don’t try to say anything else. I can see it in his eyes, now. Something’s broken inside of him.

Over his shoulder, a glint catches my eye - it’s a flintlock. The first of Gangplank’s crewmen are on us.

Without thinking, I flick the card. It slices toward Graves.

His gun thunders.

My card takes out Gangplank’s man. His pistol was leveled at Malcolm’s back.

Behind me, another member of his crew slumps to the ground, a knife in his hand. If Graves hadn’t shot him, he could’ve had me, cold.

We both look at each other. Old habits.

Gangplank’s men are all around now, crowding in close, howling and jeering. There’s too many to fight.

That doesn’t stop Graves. He brings his gun up, but he’s out of shells.

I don’t draw any cards. There’s no point.

Malcolm roars and goes at them. That’s his way. He shatters one bastard’s nose with the butt of his gun, before the mob beats him to the ground.

Hands grab me, pinning my arms. Malcolm’s hauled to his feet, blood dripping from his face.

Ominously, the hoots and hollers from the mob around us fall silent.

The wall of thugs parts to reveal a red-coated figure striding toward us.

Gangplank.

Up close, he’s much bigger than you’d imagine. And older. The lines of his face are deep and chiseled.

He’s holding an orange in one hand, slicing off its skin with a short-bladed carving knife. He’s doing it slow, making each cut count.

“So tell me, boys,” he says. His voice is a deep, rumbling growl. “Do you like scrimshaw?”

The fist slams into my face again. I go down hard, hitting the deck of Gangplank’s ship. Pig-iron cuffs dig into my wrists.

I’m hauled back upright and forced to kneel alongside T.F. Not that my legs would hold me if this pox-ridden mob made me stand.

The massive, slab-muscled bastard that hit me swims in and out of focus.

“Come on now, son,” I slur. “You’re doing it all wrong.”

I don’t see the next one coming. There’s just an explosion of pain, and I’m back on the deck. Once again, I’m lifted up and forced to kneel. I spit out blood and teeth. Then I grin.

“My old ma hits harder than you do, boy. And she’s been dead and buried five years now.”

He steps forward to knock me down again, but a word from Gangplank stops him in his tracks.

“Enough,” the captain says.

Swaying slightly, I try to concentrate on Gangplank’s blurred outline. Slowly, my eyes clear. At his waist, I see he’s wearing that damn knife that T.F. stole.

“Twisted Fate, huh? I heard you were good, and I’ve never been one to look down on a good thief,” Gangplank says. He steps in close and glares at T.F. “But a good thief knows better than to steal from me.” He hunkers down and looks me square in the eye.

“And you... If you’d been two shades smarter, you could have put that gun to work for me. But we’re past that now.”

Gangplank stands up and turns his back to us.

“I’m not an unreasonable man,” he continues. “I don’t expect folk to bend the knee. All I ask is a modicum of respect - something you boys pissed all over. And that can’t go unpunished.”

His crew pushes in, like dogs waiting for the order to rip us apart. I ain’t rattled, though. I won’t give them the satisfaction.

“Do me a favor,” I say, nodding toward T.F. “Kill him first.”

Gangplank chuckles at that.

He nods to a crewman, who starts banging away on the ship’s bell. In answer, dozens more across the port city ring out. Drunks, sailors, and shopkeeps start pouring onto the streets, drawn by the ruckus. The bastard wants an audience.

“Bilgewater’s watching, boys” Gangplank says. “Time to give ’em a show. Bring out Death’s Daughter!”

There’s a cheer, and the deck drums with the clamor of stamping feet. An old cannon is wheeled out. It may be rusted and green with age, but it’s still a beauty.

I glance over at T.F. His head’s down, and he ain’t sayin’ nothin’. They took his cards off him... once they found ’em all. They didn’t even leave him his stupid, dandy hat - some little inbred bastard in the crowd’s wearing it.

In all my years of knowing T.F., he’s always had an out. Without one, here and now, he looks defeated.

Good.

“You’re gettin’ what you deserve, you son of a bitch,” I snarl at him.

He stares back at me. There’s fire in him still.

“I ain’t proud of how things went-”

“You left me to rot!” I interrupt.

“Me and the whole crew tried to break you out. And they died for it!” he snaps back at me. “We lost Kolt, Wallach, the Brick - all of ’em - just trying to save your stubborn ass.”

“You made out alright, though,” I reply. “You know why? It’s because you’re a coward. And nothing you’ll ever say can change that.”

My words hit him like a punch in the guts. He doesn’t argue. The last glimmer of fight in him goes, and his shoulders slump. He’s done.

I don’t think even T.F. is this good an actor. My anger fades.

I feel tired suddenly. Tired and old.

“Everything went to hell, and maybe we’re both to blame,” he says. “I wasn’t lying, though. We tried to get you out. Doesn’t matter. You’ll believe what you want anyway.”

It takes a moment for that to sink in. It takes a moment longer to realize that I believe him.

Damn me, he’s right.

I do things my way. Always have. Whenever I pushed it too far, he had my back. He was always the one with the out.

But I didn’t listen to him that day, and I haven’t since.

And now, I’ve killed us both.

Suddenly, T.F. and I are yanked to our feet and dragged toward the cannon. Gangplank pats its muzzle, like it’s a prized hound.

“The Death’s Daughter’s done well by me,” he says. “I’ve been wanting to give her a proper send off.”

A heavy chain is dragged forward, and sailors begin looping it around the cannon. I see now how this is gonna pan out.

T.F. and I are shoved back to back, and the same chain is run around our legs and through our manacles. A padlock snaps shut, binding us to the chain.

A boarding gate in the ship’s bulwark slides open, and the cannon’s rolled into place in the gap. The wharfs and docks of Bilgewater are now packed with gawkers, here to see the show.

Gangplank rests the heel of his boot on the cannon.

“Well, I can’t get us out of this one,” T.F. says, over his shoulder. “I always knew you’d get me killed one day.”

A laugh escapes my lips at that. It’s been a long time since I laughed.

We’re dragged toward the edge of the ship, like cattle to the slaughter.

I guess this is where my story ends. I had a good run for a while there. But nobody’s luck lasts forever.

It’s only then that I know what I should do.

Carefully, straining against my manacles, I reach into my back pocket. It’s still there; the playing card T.F. dropped back in the warehouse. I’d aimed to shove it down his bastard throat.

They checked T.F. good for cards – but not me.

I nudge him. Chained back to back, it’s easy to hand the card off to T.F. without being seen. I can feel him hesitate as I pass it to him.

“You two will make a meager tithe, but you’ll serve,” says Gangplank. “Give the Bearded Lady my regards.”

With a wave to the crowd, Gangplank kicks the cannon over the side. It hits the dark water with a splash, and sinks fast. The chain on the deck spools out after it.

Now, at the end, I believe T.F. I know he tried everything to get me out, like he did all those times when we ran together. This time, for once, I’ve got the out. I can at least give him that.

“Get outta here.”

He starts going through the motions, spinning the card around his fingers. As the power starts to build, I feel an uncomfortable pressure in the back of my skull. I always hated being close to him when he did his trick.

And then, he’s gone.

The chains binding T.F. drop to the deck with a crash, and there’re shouts from the crowd. My chains are still locked tight. I ain’t getting out of this, but it’s worth it just to see the look on Gangplank’s face.

The cannon’s chain yanks me off my feet. I hit the deck hard, and grunt in pain. In an instant, I’m dragged over the edge of the boat.

The cold water hits me, stealing my breath.

Then I’m under, sinking fast, dragged down into the dark.

The card Malcolm puts in my hand could easily get me to the wharf. I’m so close to shore, and from there, the huge crowd’s just perfect for me to vanish into. I could be off this rat’s ass of an island inside an hour. This time, no one would ever find me.

Then all I can see in my mind is his pissed-off face disappearing into the depths.

Son of a bitch.

I can’t leave him. Not after last time. There’s no running away from this. I know where to go.

The pressure builds, and then I shift.

In an instant, I’m right behind Gangplank, ready to make my move.

One of his crew spots me – he looks baffled, like he’s trying to figure out how I got there. While he thinks about it, I punch him square in the face. He collapses into a crowd of bewildered deckhands. They all turn on me with cutlasses drawn. Gangplank leads the attack, slashing straight at my throat.

But I’m faster. In one deft move, I slide underneath the arcing steel and lift Gangplank’s prized silver dagger from his belt. Behind me, I hear cursing that could split the mast in two.

I leap to the deck, stowing the dagger in my britches as the end of the chain tears toward the edge of the ship. I stretch and grab the last steel link just before it disappears overboard.

The snap of the chain hauls me over the side, and now I realize what I’ve done.

The water is coming at me fast. In that frozen moment, every single part of me wants to let go of the chain. Being a river man who can’t swim has plagued me my whole life. Now it’ll be the death of me.

I take one final gulp of air. Then a musket shot rips into my shoulder. I yell out in pain, and lose my last breath just before I’m dragged under.

Frigid water punches me in the face as I sink into the suffocating blue.

This is my nightmare.

Panic wells inside. I try to quell it. It’s almost too much. More shots pierce the water above me. I’m still sinking.

Sharks and devilfish circle. They taste the blood. They follow me deeper into the abyss.

Everything is terror. No pain now. Heart pounds in my ears. Chest burning. Gotta keep the water out. Darkness coils around me. Too far down. No way back. I know that now.

But maybe I can save Malcolm.

Below me, there’s a thud, and the chain goes slack. The cannon’s hit the seabed.

I pull myself down the chain into the shadows. There’s a shape below. I think it’s Graves. Frantic, I drag myself toward him.

Then he’s right in front of me, though I can barely see the outline of his face. I think he’s shaking his head at me, angry that I came back.

I’m growing faint. My arm is numb and my skull is being crushed.

Letting go of the chain, I pull the dagger from my waist. My hand trembles.

I fumble in the darkness. By some miracle, I find the lock on Graves’s cuffs. I work the blade to coax it open, like I have a thousand locks before. But my hands won’t stop shaking.

Even Graves must be terrified. His lungs have to be giving out by now. The lock isn’t budging.

What would Malcolm do?

I twist the dagger. No finesse - nothing but force.

Something gives. I think I cut my hand. The dagger is falling. Into the abyss. There it goes... Is it glowing?

Above me, bright red. Red and orange... Everywhere. It’s beautiful... So this is what it’s like to die.

I laugh.

Water rushes in.

It’s peaceful.

Miss Fortune stared across the harbor from the deck of her ship, the Syren. Flames reflected in her eyes as she absorbed the full level of destruction she had wrought.

All that remained of Gangplank’s ship was burning wreckage. The crew had been killed in the detonation, drowned in the chaos, or claimed by the swarming razorfish.

It had been glorious. An immense ball of rolling fire had lit up the night like a new sun.

Half the city had witnessed it; Gangplank himself had seen to that, as she knew he would. He had to parade Twisted Fate and Graves in front of Bilgewater. He had to remind everyone why no one should cross him. To Gangplank, people were just tools used to maintain control - so she’d used that to kill him.

Shouts and tolling bells echoed across the port city. Word would be spreading like wildfire.

Gangplank is dead.

The corners of her lips curled into a smile.

Tonight was merely the endgame: Hiring T.F., tipping off Graves – all just to distract Gangplank. It had taken years to exact her revenge.

Miss Fortune’s smile faded.

From the moment he had stormed into her family’s workshop, his face hidden behind a red bandana, she had been preparing herself for this moment.

Sarah lost both her parents that day. She was just a child, but he shot her down as she stood watching her parents bleed out on the floor.

Gangplank taught her a harsh lesson: that no matter how safe you feel, your world – everything you’ve built, everything you care for - can be taken away in an instant.

Gangplank’s one mistake was not making sure she was dead. Her anger and her hate had sustained her through that first cold, painful night, and every night since.

For fifteen years, she had scraped together everything she needed; waiting until she wasn’t even a memory to him, for him to drop his guard and get comfortable in the life he’d built. Only then would he truly be able to lose everything. Only then would he know what it felt like to lose his home, to lose his world.

She should have been feeling exultant, but she just felt empty.

Joining her at the gunwale, Rafen jolted Sarah from her reverie.

“He’s gone,” he said. “It’s over.”

“No,” replied Miss Fortune. “Not yet.”

She turned from the harbor, casting her gaze across Bilgewater. Sarah had hoped that killing him would kill her hate. But all she had done was unleash it. For the first time since that day, she felt truly powerful.

“This is just the beginning,” she said. “I want everyone loyal to him to be brought to answer. I want the heads of his lieutenants mounted on my wall. Burn every bawdy house, tavern, and warehouse that bears his mark. And I want his corpse.”

Rafen was shaken. He’d heard words like that before, but never from her.

I’ve thought a lot about the ways I’d wanna go out. Chained up like a dog at the bottom of the ocean? That one never crossed my mind. Lucky for me, T.F. manages to pop the lock on my shackles just before he drops the dagger.

I scramble out of the chains, thirsty for breath. I turn toward T.F. Poor bastard’s not moving. I twist my hand around his collar and start kickin’ toward the surface.

As we go up, suddenly everything lights up bright red.

A shockwave knocks me ass over ears. Chunks of iron sink past us. A cannon plunges by. Then a charred hunk of rudder. Bodies, too. A face covered in tattoos stares in shock at me. The severed head then slowly disappears into the darkness beneath us.

I swim faster, my lungs set to bust.

An age later, I’m at the surface, coughing up salt water and gasping for air. But it’s damn near unbreathable. Smoke chokes me and claws at my eyes. I’ve seen things burn in my time, but never like this. Looks like someone set the whole world on fire.

“Damn me...” I hear myself mutter.

Gangplank’s ship is gone. Bits of smoking debris are scattered all across the bay. Fiery islands of wood collapse all around, hissin’ as they go under. A flaming sail falls right in front of us, nearly dragging T.F. and me back down for good. Burning men desperately jump from smoldering pieces of wreckage into the water, quietin’ their own screams. It smells like the end of everything – sulfur and ash and death; cooked hair and melting skin.

I check on T.F. I’m strugglin’ to keep him above water. Son of a bitch is a lot heavier than he looks, and it ain’t helping that half my ribs are broke. I find a piece of scorched hull floating nearby. It looks solid enough. I pull us both on top. It ain’t exactly seaworthy, but it’ll do.

For the first time, I get a good look at T.F. He ain’t breathin’. I wail on his chest with my fists. Just when I’m worried I’m going to cave his ribs in, he coughs out a lungful of seawater. I slump and shake my head again as he slowly comes to his senses.

“You stupid son of a bitch! What did you come back for?”

It takes him a minute to answer.

“Thought I’d try it your way,” he mutters, slurring his words. “See what being a stubborn ass felt like.” He hacks up more water. “Feels awful.”

Razorfish and even meaner sea critters are startin’ to gather around us. I ain’t about to be anything’s chow. I pull my feet away from the edge.

A mangled crewman bobs to the surface, grabbin’ for our raft. I plant my boot in his face and shove him off. A fat tentacle wraps around his neck and drags him back under. Now the fish have something else to keep ’em busy.

Before they run out of fresh meat, I break off a plank from our raft and use it to paddle us away from the feedin’ frenzy.

I pull at the water for what seems like hours. My arms are heavy and hurtin’, but I know better than to stop. Once I’ve put some distance between us and the massacre, I collapse onto my back.

I’m spent like an empty shotgun shell as I look out over the bay. It’s stained red with the blood of Gangplank and his crew. Not a survivor in sight.

How am I still breathing? Maybe I’m the luckiest man on Runeterra. Or maybe T.F.’s carrying enough good fortune for the both of us.

I see a body floating by, holding something familiar lookin’. It’s Gangplank’s little inbred bastard, still clutching T.F.’s hat. I take it off him and toss it to T.F. He ain’t even a little surprised, like he always knew he’d get it back.

“Now we just need to find your gun,” he says.

“What, you itchin’ to go back down there?” I say, pointing to the deep.

T.F. turns a funny shade of green.

“We ain’t got the time. Whoever did this, they left Bilgewater without a boss,” I tell him. “It’s gonna get ugly here, fast.”

“You’re telling me you can live without your gun?” he asks.

“Maybe not,” I say. “But I know a really good gunsmith in Piltover.”

“Piltover...” he says, lost in thought.

“Lot of money flowing through there right now,” I say.

T.F. figures hard for a moment.

“Hmm. Not sure about having you as a partner again – you’re even dumber than you used to be,” he finally answers.

“That’s alright. I’m not sure about havin’ a partner called Twisted Fate. Who the hell came up with that?”

“Well, it’s a damn sight better than my real name,” T.F. laughs.

“Fair enough,” I admit.

I grin. It feels just like the old days. Then I go stone faced and look him dead in the eye.

“Just one thing: You ever have mind to leave me holding the bag again, I’ll blow your goddamn head off. No questions.”

Fate’s laugh dies down, and for a moment, he glares back at me. Then, after a while, he just smiles.

“You got a deal.”

Bilgewater was devouring itself. The streets rang with the shrieks of the desperate and the dying. Fires burning in the lowly slums rained ash across the entire city. Control had been lost, and now every gang rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the fall of one man. A war had been started by the spread of three simple words: Gangplank is dead.

Savage ambitions and petty grudges that had festered for years were now being acted upon.

On the docks, a crew of whalers ran down a rival fisherman. They skewered him with harpoons and left his body hanging from a trotline.

At the highest peak of the island, tall opulent gates that had stood since Bilgewater’s founding were battered apart. A cowering gang lord was ripped from his bed by a rival. His mewling cries were silenced when his skull was dashed upon the hand-crafted marble of his own front steps.

Along the wharf, a fleeing Red Cap attempted to staunch a bloody head wound. He looked over his shoulder but could see no sign of his pursuers. The Jagged Hooks had turned on the Caps. He had to get back to the safe house to warn his crew.

He rounded the corner, screaming for his brothers to gather their arms and join him. But his thirst for blood dried in his throat. Standing in front of the Red Caps’ own den was a band of Hooks. Their blades dripped with gore. At their head, a wiry figure, barely a man, creased his pock-marked face with a vicious grin.

The Red Cap had time to utter one last curse.

Across the bay, off a quiet back alley, a physician attempted to ply his trade. The gold he had been handed was plenty to buy his services – and assure his silence.

It had taken half an hour to peel the sodden coat from the sloughing flesh of his patient’s arm. The doctor had seen many horrific injuries before, but even he recoiled at the sight of the mangled limb. He paused for a moment, terrified of the response his next words would provoke.

“I... I’m sorry. I can’t save your arm.”

Within the shadows of the candlelit room, the bloodied ruin of a man composed himself before staggering to his feet. His good hand shot out like a lash and wrapped around the throat of the quivering doctor. He lifted the surgeon slowly, measuredly off the floor and pinned him to the wall.

For a terrible moment, the brute stood impassively, considering the man in his grasp. Then he abruptly dropped him.

Lost in panic and confusion, the healer coughed violently as the shadowed mass strode to the back of the room. Passing through the light of the surgeon’s lantern, the patient reached for the top drawer of a well-worn cabinet. Methodically, the man opened each drawer searching for what he needed. Finally, he stopped.

“Everything must have a purpose,” he said, looking at his mutilated arm.

He pulled something from the case, and threw it to the doctor’s feet. There, glinting under the lantern was the clean steel of a bonesaw.

“Cut it off,” he said. “I’ve got work to do.”

There existed, among the multitude of disgusting Bilgewater shipping warehouses filled with rusted knives and arms-length carnivorous rats, one Bilgewater shipping warehouse devoid of such things. Owned by a Piltovan arms dealer whose relative was recently murdered (and skinned and stuffed into a dockside horror house), it was primarily used to ship large quantities of high explosives—both powder and hex—to various enemies of peace across the continent. Most notably, the Noxians in Ionia, the Noxians in Shurima, the Noxians in Demacia, and, very occasionally, the Noxians in Noxus—the latter having recently sent a letter threatening to murder “the cheap bastard who was gouging them with their bomb prices.”

Said Piltovan owner-slash-bastard, deciding it was no longer safe to be the consigliere of colonial evil, therefore employed a group of heavily armed Azure Way mercenaries to guard his warehouse while simultaneously hiring a different group of heavily armed mercenaries to steal the entire hoard from under the first group’s noses. A great sum of coin was spent insuring this hoard so that in the event of a colossal chain explosion during a violent, hypothetical gunfight, the owner would walk away an ever-so-slightly wealthier arms dealer. A forward-thinking business decision, considering his heist crew consisted of notorious con artist Twisted Fate, and notorious bath-avoider Malcolm Graves.

Collateral damage was intended.

“What the blue hells is this? Some kinda setup?” Malcolm Graves correctly guessed from behind a second-floor catwalk, his large, meaty body only barely concealed by a double-wide pillar. Gunfire rained upward all around him, chewing away thick pieces of his cover and punching holes into nearby shipping containers—many of which displayed prominent illustrations of a frowning cartoon man being blown apart.

“Seems that way,” Twisted Fate replied, crouched nearby as he flipped a playing card over in his fingers. With each turn, its hues shifted from blue, to red, to gold—though when he got especially nervous, he couldn’t get the order right. This was a problem, considering the red ones caused large flaming explosions, the gold ones caused large glittering explosions, and the blue ones were not really that useful right now.

“Why aren’t you doing anything, ya jackass? I can’t even take a shot!” yelled Graves, his finger twitching over the trigger of his human-sized shotgun. He didn’t mind being shot at as long as he could return the favor.

“They’re set up behind a crate of gunpowder,” Fate snapped back, motioning around the room that was stacked floor to ceiling with volatile dry-pack explosives. “Unless you want to go down like the Dead Pool, we might need to figure out a plan B.”

“I don’t wanna do that!” whinged Graves, not specifying whether he meant dying or thinking. “This sucks! Why do we always gotta pick the weird jobs?”

“Because they pay the best,” replied Fate, perhaps more nonchalantly than the moment called for. “Ain’t a reflection on us.”

“Huh. Makes sense when you say it like that.” Graves pondered their predicament, wondering if his smoke bombs would cause the pair to immediately die by igniting some stray black powder on the warehouse floor, or if they’d die half a second later when one of the blinded fish-men accidentally fired his gun into a crate of dynamite. The second option sounded good. Really good. Really, really good.

“I’ve got a really, really, really good plan!” Graves announced, confidently holding out a live grenade. He glanced at the tiny frowning cartoon man on the boxes in front of him. “Don’t judge me,” he told him.

“What are you doin’?” Fate protested, his eyes widening in horror as Graves’ arm arced back for the throw. In his mind, he saw the two of them disintegrating along with a good portion of the Slaughter Docks—or at least Graves disintegrating, which would be inconvenient at best. “Malcolm, what are you doin’?”

“Wait!” boomed a voice from below. “Do not throw that!”

Graves, somewhat disheartened by the order, but equally grateful the gunfire had suddenly ebbed, lowered his smoke bomb. Fate, who in a state of panic had forgotten the color of the card he held, gripped a red one, which would have accidentally killed everyone if he’d mistakenly activated it to try and escape the warehouse.

The partners locked eyes for a moment, looked at their respective explosives, then back at each other.

“Mine was better,” gloated Graves. “Safer.”

The voice from below, now near hysterical, busied itself commanding the other mercenaries to stop firing wildly into a warehouse stuffed with bombs, specifically lambasting someone named Kouign who “should know better after last time.” The gunmen grumbled in turn. Or burbled, or blubbed, depending on the size and configuration of their prominently fishy heads.

As the unseen voice in charge moved about, Fate leaned over to Graves, pointing at his interior coat pocket. “You still got that blue card I gave you?” he whispered.

“What, the one from the Sentinels? Yeah, I still got it,” Graves answered at a normal volume.

“Quiet. Now what say we pop that sucker and get out of here? These guys are distracted. They’ll never know we left.”

“Nuh-uh, you already told me what all this is worth. You think I’m just gonna leave a score that big on the table? I got a mouth to feed: mine.”

“We shoulda died at least a hundred times already. Now’s the chance to cut our losses.”

“I’ll never die, because I’m the handsome protagonist. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone knows squat. One stray bullet, and we’re all portraits at a funeral.”

“Your funeral, maybe. I beat Viego. That makes me the male lead.”

“The male lead? I am so tired of this damn story!” yelled Fate, immediately attracting the attention of everybody in the room.

“See? That’s your fault. Real deuteragonist behavior,” Graves gloated, about forty percent sure he used the word “deuteragonist” right.

Everyone collectively hesitated, each glancing around nervously as the realization of where they were and what, exactly, they had gotten themselves into began to sink in. Yet neither the pair of bumblers nor the rank and file Azure Way castoffs had the authority to end this standoff... Or really any standoff, as immediate and violent escalation is a rich Bilgewater tradition.

The tall hammerhead-shark man with a menacing harpoon gun and no shirt was also unable to end this standoff, but he did not know it yet. His name was Bombolini, and the two things he knew best were how to project an understated elegance for a creature of his stature, and how to know exactly what to say to command a room.

“What are you doing, you buncha ding dongs?” he shouted toward the catwalk. “You tryna vaporize half of Bilgewater? What kind of heist crew brings live ammunition to a powder job?”

Malcolm Graves and Twisted Fate both (unwisely) poked their heads out from their cover, each looking into a different monocular eye of their newfound opponent. His steely gaze, his muscular figure, his mean-looking weapon that was clearly intended to skewer sea serpents. A second of recognition passed. Two seconds. And then, for some reason, three.

“Bombolini?” Graves asked.

“Malcolm?” Bombolini asked back. “Malcolm Graves? Is that you? Are... Are you robbing me?”

Graves let out a sigh of relief, relaxing his shoulders. This wasn’t just any dumb fish. This was a dumb fish friend.

“I’m not robbing you. I’m robbing the guy who hired you,” Graves explained. “I think he hired us, too. Which makes what we’re doin’ up here morally sound.”

“Us?”

“Hey, Bombolini,” Fate waved. “I’m robbing you, too.”

“Wha—” protested Bombolini. “Now wait a damn minute! You two blew me up! You blew me up on my own ship! We were partners, and you double-crossed me for the worst score this city has ever seen!”

“It wasn’t the worst,” retorted Graves.

“One jewel,” Fate corrected. “Ended up being glass.”

“Nah, that’s not right,” Graves said. “Had to be more.”

But it wasn’t.

Many years prior, Bombolini had been the unappreciated third member of the Graves & Fate crime duo back when they pulled small jobs for bad pay, and their posters were somewhat... unfortunately worded.

“Two men who will do anything (and we mean anything) to anybody (and we mean anybody) for the right price (any price),” the leaflets used to say, which, in addition to Bombolini’s complete erasure from the group, led to a number of rather avoidable miscommunications with prospective clientele. And thanks to Bilgewater’s rich tradition of violent escalation, these mishaps tended to end in bloodshed or minor dock explosions—ironically drawing enough attention to the upstart criminals that they became a popular mercenary outfit.

The leaflets remained unchanged for years, which made a young Bombolini deeply bitter. He eventually used his portion of the group’s earnings to buy a modest schooner, retire from criminality, and start a solo wreck-diving operation in the Blue Flame Isles that paid much better than robbery and coincidentally did not bill itself as some sort of pirate flesh carnival in bar flyers.

Also coincidentally, success tends to draw eyes, and two of those eyes eventually hired Malcolm Graves and Twisted Fate to rob their former companion at a dive site near a Buhru ruin. Lacking any moral fiber whatsoever, the pair immediately accepted. The robbery instantly led to a small oil fire, then a large oil fire, then bloodshed followed by a minor schooner explosion. All the treasure sank with the ship... save, of course, for a single piece of sea glass.

Bombolini was assumed dead, the client was furious, and nobody got paid. All in all, it was one of the duo’s more successful heists.

“Didn’t you die?” asked Fate. “I’m pretty sure you died.”

Bombolini tilted his head, unable to see any part of himself thanks to the wide setting of his predatory eyes—though the attempt was quite valiant. “Does it look like I’m dead?”

“I dunno,” replied Graves. “Maybe.”

“Are we going to kill them, boss?” asked a fishman impatiently, this one a spotter resembling a large, bipedal goby.

“I second Goby,” said his partner, a hunched-over humanoid pistol shrimp with a rather impressive long gun. “You said these guys double-crossed you before, right? What’s their deal?”

Bombolini blinked, his walnut-sized brain chugging along as he attempted to remember what exactly their deal had been. After a few decades, one tends to forget the intricacies of their archnemeses.

Graves. Fate. Graves... but also... Fate. What is their deal?

Eureka.

He had arrived at something interesting. Something he could use. Something that would turn the entire confrontation on its head.

“They’re together,” he guessed confidently.

A pause.

“We know that,” replied Goby.

“No, they’re together,” Bombolini repeated, even more confidently. “I knew they’d end up with each other. Graves always had the worst taste in men, and Fate is the worst man I’ve ever met. It all makes sense!”

Goby shrugged. Shrimp sighed and turned back toward the pair of thieves above, adjusting the sight on his gun as he wondered why, exactly, he’d agreed to any of this in the first place.

Up on the catwalk, however, the mood was decidedly different.

“He thinks we’re together,” whispered Fate. “Like, together-together. A couple. Romantically.”

“I know what ‘together’ means, Tobias,” Graves whispered back, now decidedly more discreet than before. “But how do we use it? What’s the play? And why was he so mean?”

Fate stroked his chin with his free hand, flipping the errant red card into a gold card as he turned the question over in his head. The chance of everyone dying in a colossal fireball was still higher than he liked, but with Bombolini and his men off guard, now was the time for bold action. He needed something big. Something dumb. Something that would turn the entire confrontation on its head. He needed...

“I cannot believe you got us into this mess again!” Fate shouted, pointing an accusatory finger at Graves while making sure most of his body remained hidden from the sniper. “This is just like you, never thinking before you show up! You’re too big, you have no finesse, and you packed hex-shots and grenades for a powder job! My ma was right, we shouldn’t have stayed together!”

Graves was taken aback for several reasons. The first of which is that he had never met Fate’s mother, and, up until this point, had not been sure she even existed. The second was that Fate had not explained the plan to him and was now making jabs at Graves’ rugged burliness and masterful heist preparation—both of which made him a statuesque prince among thieves.

“Hey, what are you sayin’? You’re the one always goin’ on about how you’re so clever, and yet here we are, pullin’ another garbage job where you’re gonna die and I gotta save you! If it were up to me, we’d be doin’ easy jobs, like individual murders and light-to-heavy extortion!”

“Yeah, because you have no vision!” Fate continued, emphasizing the word “vision” while winking prominently.

Graves did not register this right away, and continued to bluster about his partner’s many shortcomings.

“That’s why we always fight,” Fate winked again. This one broke through.

Down below, Bombolini was ecstatic among an otherwise bored or confused crew.

When one is double-crossed by an old friend, their emotional chemistry is irreversibly altered. It makes them paranoid, delusional, and most importantly, occasionally taken with intricate revenge fantasies.

Bombolini embodied all of this. He often liked to entertain one of these fantasies wherein his two most hated enemies had an immediate falling out in front of his steely shark eyes. This falling out would take place in some sort of room or vessel with a heavy explosive payload that would, at the apex of the argument, burst into flames and detonate, killing them both as the smoke spelled out “We’re sorry, Bombolini.” Then everyone would cheer, and he would be given a crown and a sash. Possibly a scepter.

It was a very intricate fantasy.

What was not part of the fantasy was being hit squarely in the chest by a well-aimed gold card and flying out of the shipping door into the sea.

“Now!” said Fate, dashing out from his cover and into an adjoining office as he splashed the bare walls with gold cards wherever the explosives weren’t stacked high enough to ignite. Each card burst with a dazzling spray of golden filament, temporarily stunning Bombolini’s mercenaries who then immediately began firing in all directions.

As Graves followed Fate through the suite and into the guts of the larger warehouse, a stray bullet buried itself in the crate Goby and Shrimp were using for cover, and the two fish-men froze. With bullets whizzing through the air, Goby looked at Shrimp, and Shrimp looked at Goby. What felt like an eternity passed between them.

“I think we’re sa—” said Goby, exploding.

The first blast rocked the entire structure as Fate and Graves stumbled along a flimsy metal suspension bridge over far more crates of black powder than their client had originally described.

“That’s not good,” said Fate with a glance below.

“It really isn’t,” replied Graves. “I know we was doing a bit, but on a personal and professional level, I am not happy with you right now.”

“You’re never happy with me, anyway! We gotta move!” exclaimed Fate as several armed mercenaries looked up from the gloom, suddenly noticing the two distinctly non-fishlike criminals above them.

Graves, now more emotionally wounded than he wanted to let on, tossed a smoke grenade over the side of the catwalk, enveloping the first floor in a thick cloud of caustic fog. “That’s usually fun, but my heart’s just not in it right now,” he explained over the sound of dry-heaving mercenaries.

“Why are you being such a big baby? You’re a grown man!” shouted Fate, attempting to move the action along as stray shots rang out across the powder storage floor.

“Stop calling me a big baby! You’re always taking shots at my size. I’m the muscle that saves the day every time you get your goose cooked. You’re ungrateful as hell, Fate!”

“I’m ungrateful? I’m not the one who disappeared for months to go fight some Camavor ghost prince, then rolled back into town one night like he owned the place.”

“He was a ghost king, and you’re lucky I fought him or we’d all be ghosts! You’d be a ghost, I’d be a ghost. Everyone would be a ghost!”

“You weren’t even there! You think I don’t read Shauna’s letters? Graves, I’m a con man, you can’t trick me. They left you outside while scissors doll and the shirtless wonder saved the day.”

“That ain’t how it went down, Fate,” said Graves darkly. “That’s just the story. We don’t talk about what really happened.”

“Oh, please! Your delusions of grandeur were annoying decades before you became Valoran’s number-one hero.”

“Is this still a fake fight or are we having a real fight? Because if it’s a real fight, I will punch that stupid hat through your mouth.”

“I think it’s a real fight! And you know what else? You do stink, and you don’t think things through, and live grenades were not the best call here!”

“Yeah, well, this is why we stopped working together the first damn time! Because you think you’re better than me, and you think you’re better than this!”

“And what if I am?” yelled Fate, only realizing what he’d said after he had said it.

From the burning, rupturing front of the warehouse, Bombolini’s surviving mercenaries poured through the service door and onto the catwalk, its bolts decoupling from the walls under their combined weight. Many of the gunmen were badly singed and filled with a roiling anger fit to match their newfound crispiness.

“We can fight later, dammit! Get yer behind out that door!” Graves commanded as he and Fate dropped their argument and made a run for the exit with a rapidly sinking catwalk buckling underfoot.

Six strides from the doorway, another blast tore upward from the powder floor, consuming the Azure Way mercenaries in a pillar of raging flame as the crates beneath them began to blow one by one. The smoke from Graves’ grenade, a highly flammable mix of stinging, blinding, and stinking components deployed for tactical measures, immediately caught fire—something Graves did not account for, despite his supplier telling him several dozen times that the smoke was flammable. This, of course, ignited and exploded even more crates of black powder, launching both the slick card-sharp and the daring bath-avoider through a crumbling brick wall, down one floor, and into a grimy foyer—also filled wall-to-wall with explosives.

Among their heists, it still counted as one of the more successful ones.

“Ugh,” groaned Graves. “That sucked.”

Fate fumbled above his head to make sure his hat was still there, and only when he confirmed its safety did he hold his screaming ribs. “Yeah, it did.”

“Tobias, if we don’t make it out of this... I just wanna say one thing.”

“What is it, friend?” smiled Fate.

“I hope you die first,” Graves cough-laughed.

“Aw, shucks, that’s sweet.”

The warehouse shook again as debris and chunks of roof smacked hard against the floor, smoke poured through the gaping second-story hole in the wall, and flames licked tightly packed boxes of hexplosives—these emblazoned with a different frowning cartoon man in the process of blowing up.

“Did no one notice how wildly unsafe this was?” asked Graves, hobbling toward what appeared to be a service exit.

“It’s Bilgewater, Malcolm. Nobody notices anything.”

“Nobody... except for me!” said a familiar, if slightly raspier, voice.

Bombolini, now sporting a thick purple bruise in the center of his torso, stepped theatrically before the duo, his harpoon gun primed as his large, sharky shape stood between Bilgewater’s most-noticed mercenaries and the only way out. Graves caught sight of a damp, shark-shaped spot on the dock outside. Bombolini had likely been hiding there, waiting minutes for this reveal.

“Gods, not this donut again,” Fate muttered.

“And yet, it is!” Bombolini exclaimed, stifling a cough. “Do you know what I thought when I saw you two after all these years? After all that time, all that—”

“Not interested,” said Graves, pointing his massive shotgun at a container of explosives directly next to the shark-man. Graves pulled the trigger, the gun fired, and everything went up in smoke.

Several hundred arm spans from the rupturing warehouse once filled with far too many explosives to actually steal, Malcolm Graves and Twisted Fate suddenly appeared in the air a length and a half above a quaint little fishing pier... along with some residual smoke and flame, as Fate’s teleportation timing had not been perfect. The two crashed onto the ground with Graves’ gun landing squarely on his stomach. The sound he made was a bit like “uhbloof,” though it could have been any number of other expletives.

“Those blue cards sure are useful,” Fate bragged from flat on his newly injured back, dusting off his hat with the arm that wasn’t cradling his possibly broken ribs. It had been a long day.

“Yeah, but they’re never useful in the beginning,” wheezed Graves, a little toasty and bruised, but otherwise none the worse for wear. “We should use them before a gunfight breaks out. For stealing and whatnot.”

“That takes the artistry out of it. You don’t build a name for yourself by sticking to the shadows—you have to give the people a show!” Fate replied as the warehouse’s frame sagged in the distance and flames erupted furiously from still-unexploded payloads. He theatrically twirled his hand a bit, as if to underline the point.

“Fair,” said Graves, unconvinced.

The pair sat up in their blackened clothes, watching everything explode and then explode some more. It was almost romantic. If one considered that sort of thing romantic. Which, interestingly enough, they did.

“So, uh... what now?” Fate said, breaking the silence as quickly as possible. “Double-cross our dirty client? Dig a grave for whatever’s left of Bombolini?”

Graves chuckled. “Oh, we’re definitely doing that first thing. Nobody tries to blow me up without me blowing them up. As for Bombolini... I’d bet good money the shark is still out there. He’s like me. Too dumb to explode.”

“My friend, you’re the most brilliant dummy I ever did meet,” smiled Fate. “You’ll never explode. And I mean that sincerely.”

“Damn right,” puffed Graves. “Though, now that we’ve had it out... you and I need to have a conversation.”

“Right,” Fate sighed. He was tired of looking for ways to avoid apologizing, and all the adrenaline made him feel better about breaking his cardinal rule of never doing it for any reason.

He still wouldn’t say the word “sorry,” though. That was a bridge too far.

“Malcolm, I did not mean to imply that I was better than you. When we dissolved the business—”

“Stop, stop, stop,” said Graves, laying his shotgun behind himself as he dangled his legs over the water. “I already hate this. Apology accepted—next round’s on you.”

“Good man,” replied Fate thankfully, gazing across the sea as the sun began to set.

Graves looked over at his partner to add another quip, but noticed, perhaps for the first time, that there was a certain angularity to Tobias’ features that he had thus far failed to appreciate. A strong jaw, a shockingly unbroken nose, a bold choice in semi-fashionable hats. He was an objectively terrible person, but maybe the right kind of terrible for...

Uh-oh, he thought.

Malcolm Graves, now much older, only somewhat wiser, but infinitely more worldly, measured his next words more carefully than most things he did or said on any given day. Which was especially surprising to him, since navigating the complex relationship between two criminal masterminds such as themselves was not really his strong suit, nor had he ever given it much thought. He wondered... Why worry so much about Tobias’ opinion of him? It wasn’t like it mattered. They had their roles, after all, and—

“Malcolm,” Fate interrupted. “Do you have a concussion?”

“It’s possible,” Graves sighed, but not in a sad or tired way. More of a concussed way.

“Alright, let me look,” said the very injured Fate, brushing Graves’ hair aside as he looked for signs of a bruise. “We both know you’re a durable fella, but neither of us is invincible.”

“Not like Bombolini,” said Graves, confused by the welling excitement over Fate playing with his hair.

“I am legitimately dumbfounded by that,” Fate offered. “I remember that boat heist. Our old friend was caught in the middle of a deeply vicious detonation.”

“Deserved it, though. I do not have terrible taste in men. I have good taste in terrible men, and there is absolutely a difference.”

Fate finished inspecting his partner’s head, which didn’t exactly produce any new information, as he didn’t know what a concussion was supposed to look like. He gazed at Graves’ rugged features as the setting sun danced across his boyishly unkempt hair, and then considered all of those words together in a sentence, and then immediately recoiled at the complete thought. “Your taste isn’t terrible, Malcolm. It’s catastrophic.”

“Catastrophic?” Graves fired back. “Name one example. You can’t.”

“The Northman,” Fate said almost instantly. “The trader with the cockroach tattoo. That Buhru cultist—”

“Not a cultist.”

“Tried to sacrifice us both, but sure, not a cultist. The whale guy. The octopus guy. The second whale guy.”

“Orca.”

“An orca is a kind of whale. The monk. The vastaya. The Noxian.”

Graves winced. “Alright, he was bad.”

“A Noxian, Malcolm. From Noxus. People talked about that one.”

“More racist than I would have preferred in a man, in hindsight,” Graves allowed. “But it ain’t like you’re bringing home the greatest lovers in history. You ain’t that slick.”

“Excuse me, I am very slick,” Fate protested. “No matter the size, shape, make, or model, none can resist the charms of Tobias Felix. I have conned hundreds—nay, thousands—of dew-eyed tourists across the whole of this vast and gullible land.”

“Not this one,” laughed Graves, a little too forcefully. “Or, uh... you know.”

“Y... yes, of course, I am aware,” Fate responded, not making eye contact as he fiddled with his hat.

The two sat in silence for a while. Or relative silence, considering the towering flames and brutal detonations and screaming and shouting in the distance.

“Sweet Tommy Kench, look at that sucker burn,” said Graves, still dangling his legs off the pier like the world’s grungiest adult child. “Tobias, I’ve been thinking. And don’t get me wrong, I do love a crime or twenty, and you’ll be there for literally all of them—”

“What about Shauna? Or that lady with the laughing jar?” asked Fate with a tinge of poorly concealed jealousy, despite Graves having been gay for the better part of four decades.

“Vayne,” Graves corrected, more deliberately than was necessary for such a normal and casual conversation between platonic business associates, “is a good friend. But she’ll only help if we’re killing monsters. And for the love of all that’s sacred, never call her ‘Shauna.’ She will break your neck by looking at it. As for the other one... I don’t even want to deal with that right now.”

“She’s scary,” said Fate. “Never seen clothes like that before. So many hands.”

“She’s very scary,” Graves agreed. “I’m afraid she’s gonna kick me through a wall or something.

“Point is, I’m meeting new people. I’m seeing the world. Piltover. The Shadow Isles. I saw Camavor, Tobias. I’m expanding my horizons. I might even want to expand ‘em more. Hear Ixtal’s opening up. Could be good money out there... you know... if you wanted to come along for the ride.”

He rustled through his coat, producing a familiar blue playing card. “In which case, I probably wouldn’t need this anymore. Since you’d be around.”

Fate chuckled. “Why don’t you hold onto that for now? Think of it as... a souvenir.”

Graves grinned, slipping it back into his pocket. “I do like the sound of that.”

The partners smiled foolishly at this, each imagining various swashbuckling criminal misadventures while sitting at an awkward physical distance apart.

“But, you know, as, uh... partners,” Graves specified.

“Yes, obviously. Partners. In crime,” Fate added.

“Nothing else.”

“Nope.”

“Nada.”

“No sir.”

They concluded this exchange with a simultaneous fake cough. Graves looked unblinking at the water, and Fate looked at the underside of his hat. Far off in the distance, the warehouse burned and burned.

It was, all in all, one of their better heists.

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.”

The waters were eerily still at night. Their surface was so undisturbed, one might mistake it for dark glass mirroring the starlit skies above. Moonlight bathed everything in cold, silver light, though its radiance was slowly dying.

The moon was being suffocated. The sky between it and those who looked upon its beauty had been overtaken by questing tendrils of shadow that branched across the night like living, malevolent storms. Their like had been seen many times before, and many were the souls carried off within them into fathomless torment, but never had they grown so large, or reached so far.

For all their horror, the world had grown used to Harrowings, tempests of darkness teeming with monstrous wraiths that emanated from the horrid Shadow Isles. Those in their path learned how to watch for the signs, how to survive their wailing fury, and how to mourn those taken by them. But what was happening now, what was reaching up to swallow the sky, was something different.

Almost like there was some unseen hand guiding it.

Tonight, though, one could still glimpse the world and the stillness of the sea. Tonight, its perfection was marred only by tiny islands of splintered wood, torn cloth, and the bobbing forms of the newly dead.

Tudre tried not to look at them. In the first hours after their doomed flight and the desperate struggle to abandon the ship, he had screamed himself hoarse, calling out in hope that anyone else might have survived. But it was in vain. He was alone.

And so Tudre marshaled his remaining strength to cling to a hunk of driftwood, and resist the icy waters seeking to carry him down to their lightless depths. He could almost hear the deep calling up to him to join all the others, her silver tongue carrying the promise of sleep, if he would just draw her water into his lungs.

The sea had numbed his legs, but Tudre willed himself to move them. He shut out the clarion call of despair that tugged at his boots with the gentle comforts of death. Tudre had not reached this far in life through submission, and he would not start now.

He just had to get to land. Tudre had sailed with all speed to make for Fallgren, a small island off the Valoran mainland. They had gotten so close—it couldn’t be far.

Though exhaustion and the cold blurred his vision, Tudre caught movement out of the corner of his good eye. He focused, revealing it to be a scrap of oiled vellum drifting close to the splintered sanctuary he held fast to. Tudre peered at it. The marks and ink on its surface were marred and smeared by water, yet still intelligible.

It was a piece of their navigation chart. Scrawled onto it was a rough, timeworn map of trade and shipping routes and measurements of maritime distance. The names of known places, and even a few secret ones. Crude drawings of clouds with faces, breathing out gusts from between their lips to mark the best lanes where the winds might bless a ship with speedy passage, for those who dared—

“You’re insane.”

Tudre snorted, reaching up to catch the swinging lantern that was the cabin’s sole source of light. The seas were getting rougher, and he had no time to suffer his quartermaster’s nonsense.

“Gettin’ soft in yer old age, Mister Bowsy?” Tudre grinned his big, cunning grin as he baited the old corsair next to him. “No shame if ye are. Y’can tell me, though do me a kindness and say so now. I would need someone else in your spot, to keep the crew in line.”

“I ain’t scared.” Bowsy steadied himself to spit a wad of phlegm onto the deck through the gap made by a missing tooth. “But I see sense. This’ll get us killed, skipper. And I ain’t the only one who thinks so.”

“We go fast, we get rich.” Tudre stabbed a finger down at the old map set on the table before them. He swept aside a tiny puddle that had collected on it from a drip above their heads, and then traced a route denoted in dull red ink. “Every other ship around is docked, crews actin’ like they be back on dear ol’ mum’s teat. But commerce ne’er sleeps, Mister Bowsy. Think on what’s sittin’ out there, unguarded! We make a run, we can get what they’re all too craven to collect.”

“They’re tied to dock because it’s a damn Harrowing.” Bowsy crossed his thick, tattooed arms over his chest. “Biggest anyone’s seen, mind you, even the oldest ones. Whatever’s out there ain’t worth bein’ swept up in that, I’m tellin’ ya!”

Tudre straightened, finding some of the red ink had come off the map to stain his finger. He stared his quartermaster in the eye. His voice dropped, settling into the colder tone that meant the discussion had run its course. “Anyone wants out can go, no repercussions. Less hands means a greater stake for those with the grit to be going out. And we are going out, make no mistake.”

Bowsy tried, one last time. “At least let it be put to a vote. Let the crew have their say in it.”

“Not this time.”

Tudre’s good eye bored into the quartermaster, unyielding. Bowsy held his gaze for a moment that stretched into another, but no further. He looked away.

“Now.” Tudre’s grin returned, full and cunning. “You in or not?”

Shaking his head, Tudre tried to banish the memory from his mind, but the effort left him dizzy. The unwelcome remembrance held fast despite his efforts, clinging behind his eyes like pitch. Or as though something was holding it there, forcing him to see.

He felt a strangeness fall over him then, almost like mist curling up off the water. A sailor’s life was fraught with omens and ill portents, gut feelings and lucky breaks. Tudre had long become attuned to a world that existed side by side with his own, and every now and then the walls between them thinned. It was happening to him now, like a dull throb. An insistent sense of dread and anger, seeking to work guilt into his bones. But he’d have none of it.

“Boat’s made fer sailin’, ask any man,” Tudre wheezed through chattering teeth. “I done that run dozens o’ times. See a chance at fortune, ya take it. Can’t live this life if ye ain’t the darin’ sort!”

Tudre’s words bore the hallmark bravado he had carried so well in his life, a bounty of natural grit and ruthlessness that had seen him not only rise to captain his own ship, but keep it. The high seas were unkind to the weak, as was Bilgewater and any big port whose doors he had ever darkened. Pass on an opportunity, and you might look back and see it was the last chance you had to hold onto your stake, or keep your guts in your belly.

But out in this night, and this cold, there was no one to be cowed by his speech. Only the dread that rolled up from the deep. It persisted, undiminished.

“Land is close,” Tudre told himself. “It has t’be.”

Tudre had not realized he was moving. His hunk of driftwood lived up to its name, lazily edging forward into a tangled field of debris. The corsair looked over the floating collection of scraps and splinters, but found no better means to keep from drowning. There was a bolt of sailcloth among it, but Tudre knew it would prove more a hazard than a savior. He had seen more than one panicked sailor ensnared by such in a storm, as good as chains if the winds and spray carried them over the side.

Concern creased Tudre’s weathered features as the sailcloth came closer. He put out a hand, trying to push it away, but his arm sank into it to the elbow, stealing his balance. He snarled through clenched teeth, fighting the sails—

“Hold fast!” Tudre bellowed, trying to raise his voice above the storms. “Secure that line!”

He couldn’t tell if anyone could hear him as he moved about, shouting orders. Rain and spray and shadows lashed the deck, the sails, the crew. Gales roared over and around them, not with wind but with voices. A howling choir of the harrowed damned had befallen Tudre on the last leg of his run. His ship was fast, but not fast enough to stay ahead of it.

Their hold was swollen with treasure. Goods pilfered from coastal stores, trade ships at anchor, all of it easy taking as their keepers had abandoned their posts to flee the Harrowing. That fortune was slowing them now. Bowsy would have admonished Tudre for not believing him, if he hadn’t been the first man plucked up by the darkness bearing down on them.

“Skipper!”

Tudre whirled around, hearing the boy Flir and seeing him grappling with a bolt of sail. Flir was fighting desperately to lash the sail to the mast, to keep it from stripping and snapping loose, but he was losing that fight.

Tudre locked eyes with Flir, the boy pleading for his help as the oiled cloth whipped and defied his every attempt to secure it to a spar of timber. Tudre weighed going toward him, but then saw splinters fly from the base of the spar, and all doubt fled.

“Skip—”

The timber snapped, carrying Flir up into the roiling dark. Tudre saw his eyes, wide in terror as he flew into a cloud of twisted faces and outstretched, clutching hands. A heartbeat later the boy vanished, just one more scream added to the choir.

“Better him than I,” Tudre snarled against the silent accusation of the sea. He felt the pressure of it inside his skull, the feeling of being watched even though he was alone.

The sailcloth tangled around his forearm, holding tighter the more he tried to escape.

“Better him,” he repeated, glaring down at the scrap of sail clinging to his hand, “than I.”

Why? The cloth encircling his wrist seemed to ask.

Tudre shivered, but not from the cold. The mind was playing tricks now, beaten and worn out and desperate as he was. He tried to yank his arm free, but stopped midway as he nearly lost hold of the driftwood.

“Because I be the damn captain!” Tudre spat. “’Tis my ship, and my charge. Mine’s a duty to every lad and lass aboard, not just Flir the boy. I run off to aid him, get snatched up too, what then? What becomes of the rest of me crew, without me there?”

For a moment, anger got the best of Tudre. He twisted, pulling his arm back sharply, and the sail finally relinquished its hold. But it swung him around, putting his back to the driftwood, and it was another second until his grip left him and he was under the water.

Silence rushed over him, and shocking cold. Tudre flailed for a few heartbeats before asserting control over himself. He was a seasoned man of the sea, not some green deckhand. He looked up, seeing the surface just above him, and tried to pump his arms, his legs, to raise himself back up. But he couldn’t move.

It was more than just tired muscles numbed by cold. Tudre’s good eye flicked this way and that, seeing only faint silhouettes in the waning moonlight. More debris, the lighter bits of a ship that had yet to settle down into the inky deep. And bodies. Bodies of women and men who called him captain.

Who relied upon you...

The words struck Tudre, a feeling rather than a sound.

... and you betrayed them.

Tudre broke free of whatever had been holding him, panic lending the strength he needed to surface. He gasped for air, twisting about in search of the driftwood. He spotted it and grabbed hold, embracing it like his first love.

It was only then, as his fingers sought purchase on its slick shape, that Tudre realized what it was. It was part of a lifeboat. One of the lifeboats—

“Into the lifeboats!” someone was screaming. “Abandon ship!”

There were things on board the ship now. Wretched, horrible, blighted beasts that had detached from the storm like lice shed from a dog. They stalked through the torrent without effort, undisturbed by the chaos as they butchered Tudre’s crew with fang and claw.

Tudre and his mates had earned monikers over their careers. Privateers, merchants, businessmen, all true, but just as true were pirates, corsairs, reavers. They were not strangers to violence, and every one of them walked the decks with more weapons strapped to them than they had hands to carry.

But they fell to the wraiths like wheat before the scythe. Men and women Tudre had seen brawl, hunt great leviathans of the deep, fight in the vanguard of boarding actions braving cannon and steel, begged like children to monsters that couldn’t understand a thing like mercy, much less provide it. All they provided was the severance of body and spirit.

Tudre punched and shoved his way through the mass of panicked faces crowding around the few leaky lifeboats the ship had. Several had been left behind at port to reduce weight so they could load more spoils, and now men and women packed the tiny wooden craft, far more than the boats could carry.

“Make way!” Tudre cuffed a shipmate aside, swinging one leg onto the closest lifeboat.

“Hold!” a man called out from the bow of the lifeboat. “This one’s full up! Any more, and she’ll roll us all down below.”

“Cast off!” said Tudre, fingers tightening on the hilt of the cutlass at his waist.

“Can’t risk it with this many on ’er now!” the man replied.

Tudre put a hand on the back of the man’s neck, pulling him close as though to whisper a secret in his ear. Instead the captain’s cutlass found his gut, steel bursting out the man’s back in a welter of blood rendered black by the madness swallowing them all. In one smooth motion, Tudre withdrew his blade and pitched the lifeless body over the side.

“There,” he hissed. “One body fewer. Now cast off!”

“I be a survivor,” Tudre argued, though the strength was missing from his words. “The strong live on, and the weak die. I chose life, a chance at it, for everyone in that boat, rather than capsizing it and leaving all to drown. They at least had the chance.”

He didn’t know who he was trying to convince anymore. The sense of guilt that had become a voice was now many, thundering in his mind like broadside cannon.

... you did this...

... our lives forfeit...

... your greed...

... killed us all...

... murderer...

... turncoat...

Tudre lowered his head, resting his brow against the wreckage of the lifeboat, buckling under the weight of their silent condemnation. “Stop.”

The moon’s light was nearly gone. Tudre looked up, seeing a faint blurred strip on the horizon. His soul flared with delirious hope.

“Land,” he gasped.

Nervous, hysterical laughter bubbled from Tudre’s lips, overcome with relief and the prospect of seeing the sun rise over another day. The laughter stopped abruptly, when something jostled him from behind.

He noticed then the dark shapes all around him. He could have sworn none of them had been near just moments before. Yet here they floated, bobbing gently, the still flesh of his crew surrounding him.

“I never did you ill,” said Tudre, his voice shaking. “Anythin’ we did was for yer fortune as much as mine. All of you knew the risks. You’d have done the same as me!”

The voices assailing Tudre seemed to emanate from the corpses. Their cries buffeted him, stripping his nerves bare.

“Stop!” he pleaded. “I beg ye!”

But they would not cease. They merged into a single terrible chorus, repeating a single word like a dirge to drive down and bury in Tudre’s heart.

BETRAYER!

“No!” he screamed in denial, the sound carrying over the lightless water.

As one, the spirits of Tudre’s crew sat up, peeling away from their bodies. Flir, Bowsy, all of them staring at him with slack faces and clouded eyes. No sound left their blue lips, but Tudre’s head was filled to bursting with their rage.

“No,” he wailed, screwing his eyes shut. “Just leave me be!”

Suddenly the driftwood sank a fraction, as though under added weight. Tudre forced open his eyes, and found himself staring up into the face of death.

It was a woman, tall and lithe, standing atop the driftwood with a balance that was as effortless as it was impossible. Where her flesh should have been was instead smoldering, spectral blue energy. She was clad in battered armor and a helm with a long, black plume. A trio of spears had been driven through her chest, and she had another gripped in her hand.

The sight of her turned Tudre’s insides cold and leaden. Everyone knew the legends, the whispered things a man could laugh off as stories meant to scare children. Stories of an avatar of revenge, appearing wherever injustice had been done and voices cried out for vindication.

They cried out for Lady Vengeance, and with spear in hand, she would answer with damnation.

Tudre’s crew came closer, the woman’s eerie light reflected in their blazing, sapphire eyes.

“No,” Tudre pleaded, as the sight before him, cutting him off from the promise of land ahead, wrenched away the last of his resolve. “I was only tryin’ to make me way in this world. My crew didn’t deserve their fate, no, but nor do I deserve this. You don’t know what it be like, leading those in your command to their doom, to be responsible for the damnation of their very souls!”

Sudden life was brought to her cold, unreadable features, almost as if there was a sound in the distance that only she could hear. The woman glared down at Tudre, boring into the core of him. Rage twisted her face in a rictus for an instant, and then it was gone.

Slowly she lowered her spear, resting it just under Tudre’s throat. She pushed, though not with enough pressure to pierce his flesh and impale him. Just enough to separate him from the driftwood, and push him under the water.

Tudre’s mind screamed to fight, the urge to survive willing him to rise, but he could not. The spear tip at his throat held him beneath. Tudre looked up at that shimmering, dispassionate visage. Lady Vengeance had come for him at last.

The voices had all gone silent. His crew sank down with him, closing around him like fingers making a fist. All light faded. Tudre finally succumbed to the deep, and drew her into his lungs. The last bubbles slipped from his lips as he drifted lower into the darkness, and he went down, just in sight of land.

“Is anything you just heard unclear to you?”

Tifalenji knelt in darkness. She did not raise her head to the voice addressing her, because the voice was part of that darkness. It filled the chamber, swelling warm and sickly sweet, with a scent like rotting flowers. Such a thing was not particularly remarkable to one whose life was sworn to the weft and wane of runes—even a smith as young as Tifalenji did not question what surrounded her, now.

She knew when to accept that something was beyond her understanding.

“All is clear,” she answered.

“Excellent.”

The darkness rasped, as though drawing in breath. “Your mistress spoke highly of you. Resourceful,” it spoke the word in another voice, the voice of Tifalenji’s teacher, “and those who are resourceful can be of great use.”

Tifalenji swallowed. She felt the air displace, the temperature rise as though the chamber were now filled with people. Daring to look out the corner of her eye, she saw the hems of robed figures lining the walls, ringing her and the source of the voice.

“Watch the moon.” Suddenly there was a pulse of light, reflecting cold and silver against the floor. “See its course, how it turns.”

Her mind raced, considering what lay ahead, the moments available to her spilling away one by one, like grains of sand from an hourglass.

“Remember your task above all else.” A hand extended from the dark, cupping Tifalenji’s chin. “What we have entrusted you to find, to return to us, cannot be replaced.” The hand lifted Tifalenji’s head, and she looked up into a perfect reflection of her own face, grinning with another person’s smile.

“You, however, can be.”

Erath was a son of Noxus. From the first generation of his tribe to be born into the empire, his training had begun the day he took his first steps.

Fortitude. Discipline. Resolve.

He was raised among shepherds, tending flocks and beasts of burden, keeping them well until the time for harvest came. He learned to kill, quickly and cleanly, with the small knife he had been taught to never let leave his side. It was a lesson that would do him credit when the day came that Noxus would call upon him to serve.

He had been taught to kill his enemies, his empire’s enemies, but never to hate them. Because an enemy of the empire was never more than a ceremony away from being a wayward brother or sister, brought forth with honor and purpose into the arms of Noxus to stand beside Erath in the line. To make him stronger.

Kill them until they’re family, his father had once told him, when he showed Erath the dull purple trails of his old campaign scars. Erath had never hated his enemies, but here, looking around at the scope of what surrounded him, without even knowing who their enemy was, he pitied them.

The streets quaked with an endless procession, tens of thousands of soldiers passing down the boulevards and avenues of the Immortal Bastion. A dozen tongues overlapped in the primal shouted rhythm of battle chants, marching calls, and war song. The full unbridled might of the Noxian host was on display, with blades and the hands that wielded them from across the breadth of the empire. Tribal war parties sauntered down the roads, clad in skins and ceremonial dress, followed by tightly regimented cohorts of troops encased in blackened iron plate, and a contingent of brightly uniformed naval soldiers from Shurima.

And more after them, and on, and on.

Countless peoples, but a single empire. The spectacle, the sheer demonstration of strength, stilled Erath’s heart to see it.

Erath’s own tribe was in the midst of disembarking from the riverboat that had ferried them from the plains of Dalamor down south to the capital. He and his comrades had marveled over their oars at the sight of the Immortal Bastion, the towering central monolith of ancient stone visible two days out from their arrival. He looked up from watching his chieftain Yhavi squabble with a gaggle of quartermasters to behold it again, now within the boundaries of the city proper. The sun was trapped behind the trio of enormous towers at the center of the Bastion, locked away like a shining jewel.

The thought of their unknown enemy returned to Erath’s mind, and he smiled. What could stand before this?

Donnis, one of the spearmen, nudged Erath from his thoughts, nodding toward their chieftain who was beckoning Erath over. He quickly moved to stand before Yhavi, who had just been handed a ream of vellum inked with their orders.

“We move soon,” Yhavi began, speaking in their tribal tongue as he looked over their mandate.

“Have they said where the fighting will be, yet?” asked Erath, letting his excitement get the better of him.

“No,” Yhavi frowned, squinting at the Noxian script before looking at the boy. “But it won’t matter to you. You won’t be coming with us.”

“I don’t understand,” Erath adopted his chieftain’s frown. “I’m to be your blade squire.” Erath had won the honor in a blood trial before the tribe departed home. It was Erath’s right to bear Yhavi’s wargear on the battle train, to hone and oil his relic blade on the eve of battle, to arm his chieftain and bind his wounds, and should calamity pass, to see to Yhavi’s body if he fell. If not Erath, then who?

“You shall be a blade squire indeed,” said Yhavi. “Just not mine. You have been seconded elsewhere.” He sensed the confusion in Erath, and his tone hardened. “For Noxus.”

Erath straightened, pushing the questions from his thoughts, his features neutral and firm as he thudded a fist against his chest in salute. “For the empire.”

Yhavi returned the salute, and dipped his head in approval. “We all shall answer when called, blades sharp, minds ready.”

With a deep breath, Erath put his disappointment out of his mind. “I am ready.”

Yhavi’s grim facade cracked, and he offered the boy a warm grin. “I know you are, Erath. He would see you this day and feel pride, I know it.” Erath glanced down for a moment, and Yhavi handed him a small scroll, sealed and tightly rolled. “Proceed to the ninth gate of the Bastion, across the canal just ahead of us. The legionaries will stop you. Show them this.”

Even a mention of the Trifarian Legion made Erath stand straighter. He studied the scroll, brightly bleached paper compared to the rough vellum of his brethren’s mandate. He had never seen paper before. It felt delicate in his fingers.

“It seems fate has its own course for you to walk, enhasyi,” Yhavi favored Erath with the tribal expression for a warrior poised to make his mark on the warpath. He laid a scarred paw of a hand on Erath’s shoulder, before sending him on his way. “Walk it well.”

Erath navigated the bustling throng of a city readying itself for war. For a boy raised in a lonely shepherd’s village, the scale of everything was astounding. Towering monuments and buildings of stone, iron, and glass loomed over streets worn smooth by armies marching to the next campaign. Erath moved along the current of humanity, barely able to lift his arms within the crowd. He had never considered there could be so many peoples, so many languages. It was nearly overwhelming, but he kept his mind to his duty.

Few from the tribe were learned in Noxian, but Erath knew a passable amount of Va-Noxian, the unified spoken tongue, and a paltry understanding of the empire’s formal written language. He knew enough to guess at the signs and engravings to guide him along toward the ninth gate, just up ahead, where he was to report to his new commander.

Shouldering the sackcloth pack holding his kit, Erath reached into his jerkin, passing over the bone pendant he wore around his neck. He laid a reassuring hand on the pendant for a moment before touching his orders, inscribed on the tightly rolled sheet of bleached paper. The value of the tiny thing made his mind race as to who his new leader would be, and how important their mission. He was so lost in thought he didn’t notice falling under a pair of towering shadows cast over the courtyard of the gate.

“Khosis g’vyar!”

A sharp crash of iron froze Erath in place. He looked up from the ground, finding himself staring down the gleaming edges of twin halberds, each longer than he was tall and leveled at his heart. Wielding the spears were monsters of blackened iron plate, capes the hue of fresh blood billowing from their shoulders, glowering down at him from the impassive masks of spiked war helms.

Erath’s breath caught in his throat. Trifarian Legionaries. He noticed then that the gates weren’t barred. These two, of the Noxian warrior elite, they were the bars.

The challenge repeated, thundering from one of the legionaries, somehow deepened and projected to an inhuman degree by his mask. The words were unfamiliar, thick with a strange dialect.

Was it Va-Noxian? Erath squinted, remembering what he had learned. The warrior tilted his head, clearing his throat with a sound like rubble dislodging.

“Where go, little blade?” the legionary rumbled again, in more clipped tones.

Erath exhaled like a drowning man finally reaching the water’s surface, able to understand the words. Still his tongue defied him, thick and still behind teeth he desperately fought to keep from chattering. Slowly, he reached into his jerkin, wincing as he saw the legionaries tense, and produced the scroll.

The warriors exchanged a glance, and one of them, the one who had spoken, shouldered his halberd. He advanced on Erath with heavy, pounding bootsteps, stopping just a pace away from the boy. Erath looked up, barely reaching the man’s chest, and held out his orders.

The legionary plucked the scroll from Erath’s grasp, the paper looking ridiculous in his thick, gauntleted fingers. With a quick squeeze he crushed the seal in his fist, and the scroll unspooled in a small shower of broken bits of red wax. After studying it for a moment, the legionary spun on his heel and hammered the butt of his halberd three times against the polished stone floor, the boom of each impact ringing from the dark archway of the gate.

Within seconds, Erath heard the soft, echoing slaps of sandaled feet approaching. A robed figure emerged from the darkness of the gate, her features hidden in the shadow of a red cowl. She stopped before the legionary, completely unfazed by his menacing, armored bulk, and took the scroll from him.

“You will follow me,” she said to Erath without sparing him a glance, turning and setting off across the courtyard. Erath hurried after her, looking back over his shoulder to watch the legionary plod back to his place beside his fellow guard.

Erath followed the robed woman as they crossed over another canal and wound deeper into the bustling city. They kept to side streets, avoiding the larger boulevards packed with troop movements and hemmed by rows of barrack tents arrayed on either side.

Before long, Erath began to pick up strong scents on the air. Straw, cut grass, dung, smells that were familiar to any shepherd or beast herder. He heard the low baying of animals, some he recognized, many he did not.

The narrow alley they were walking ended, opening up into a wide open square filled with people tending animals. Massive pack beasts grazed on confined plots. Men and women checked pens of sheep and counted chickens in their coops. It seemed to Erath as though the area had served some other purpose, maybe as a park or public garden, but now had been requisitioned and was being used as part of the greater mobilization.

The comfort of familiarity washed over Erath, setting his mind at ease as they stopped before a tent at the periphery of the square. The robed woman returned the scroll to Erath and pulled the flap aside, gesturing for him to enter and disappearing as soon as he had.

Inside the tent the air was cold, and thick with the spicy tang of incense that made Erath’s eyes water. He wrinkled his nose as he stood at the entrance, squinting to try to study the interior. The only light came from a kneeling figure at the center of the tent, her arms weaving a strand of glowing green runes around a sword that hung suspended in the air above her.

Erath watched the magic, entranced by the elegant dance of the runes as they burned themselves into the blade of the sword and vanished one by one. He remembered watching the shamans of his tribe as a child, when they turned the air into fire for their rituals. He avoided staring directly at the symbols, as even out of the corner of his eye they made his teeth itch. The woman turned her head slightly as the last rune winked out, catching her blade as it fell and rising to her feet.

“Reporting for duty,” Erath snapped to attention and saluted. He extended the scroll to her. “My orders.”

The woman ignored him, moving as though in a trance to set her blade on an arming rack. She lit a lantern at the center of the tent, bathing them both in soft, amber light. She was tall, her dusky skin speaking of a home far from the chill northern reaches Erath hailed from. He saw the same green light from the runes flicker once in her eyes, as she glanced at him.

“Literate?”

Erath hesitated. Her Va-Noxian had a lilting, mellifluous accent, far different from the curt and guttural voices he had heard so far in the capital. The woman’s eyes narrowed.

“You are literate?” she asked again. She looked either fatigued or bored, and Erath couldn’t tell which.

Erath nodded. “I know some of the written word, mistress.”

“Did you read this?” she asked, holding up the scroll Erath realized was no longer in his hand.

“No, mistress,” Erath shook his head.

“Good,” she said sharply, tucking the roll of paper into her sleeve. “I am Tifalenji, and from this moment, my word is law to you. Read, think, and do what I say, when I say, and much unpleasantness will be avoided between us. Do you understand?”

Erath saluted again. “Yes, mistress.”

“Once we are clear of the capital, there will be no more saluting.” Tifalenji took up a ledger from a table, thumbing through its contents.

“May I ask a question, mistress?”

She looked up. “Do not make a habit of it.”

“How may I serve?” Erath asked. “What are to be my duties?”

Tifalenji snapped the ledger shut. “I needed someone versed in the care and upkeep of beasts, young and of hearty enough stock. You are from the plains of Dalamor, yes?”

“Yes, mistress,” he fought to keep anger from his voice. He had nearly had to kill his cousin to win his blood trial and become his chieftain’s second, and now he was back to tending beasts? “I was a shepherd there.”

She offered him a thin smile, and Erath could swear he could hear something snarling behind him, just within earshot. “The creatures under your care here may be more… exotic.”

The flap of the tent was thrown open in a snap of whipping canvas. Erath turned, his hand immediately on the grip of his knife.

“I wouldn’t,” said Tifalenji, as Erath discovered the source of the snarling.

Four drakehounds lined the entrance to the tent, sleek beasts of taut rippling muscle, bony carapace, and razor-sharp claws. Erath was told stories as a boy of when the tribes of the plains were brought into the Empire, that the chief of chiefs had been honored with a single drakehound pup, a gift worth more than three wagons of silver. He had never seen one up close, let alone a whole pack of them.

A woman in gleaming war-plate stood behind them, glowering from behind an armored mask. Her hair was a stunning, crimson red, bound at the top of her head and flowing like a crest down her back. The hounds parted as she stepped forward into the tent, a pair to either side.

“Arrel,” Tifalenji inclined her head. “You made good time, tracker.”

Erath beheld Arrel, still unable to imagine someone owning four drakehounds. “Are you of the nobility, mistress?”

Arrel flicked her eyes to Erath, as gray and cold as her armor, then back to Tifalenji.

“Our blade squire,” said Tifalenji to Arrel before looking at Erath. “We don’t send the nobility to Tokogol.”

“The western frontier,” said Erath. “How did you find Tokogol, mistress?”

“Cold,” Arrel grumbled. Her voice was low, her accent severe.

“I see,” Erath nodded. “And your journey here?”

“Long,” Arrel glanced back at Tifalenji. “Does it always talk this much?”

Erath started. “Have I displeased you, mistress?”

“Fourth,” Arrel called. One of the drakehounds snapped forward from Arrel’s side, placing itself between her and Erath. Barely restrained violence radiated from the beast’s muscled frame. Thin strands of saliva descended from its bony mask, pebbled with froth from a growling throat.

“If you had displeased me, blade squire,” said Arrel, “this hound would have made it known to you. And I am not your mistress.”

“Forgiveness,” Erath took a slow step back. “How would you have me address you, then?”

“Unless necessary, I would have that you not.” She tensed, as though speaking this much had made her throat sore. She flicked her wrist, signaling an end to the discussion.

“There is a quartermaster outside gathering our supplies,” said Tifalenji, handing Erath a requisitions order. “Go and find him.”

Erath exhaled, walking carefully around Arrel and her hounds to exit the tent. He heard Arrel ask a question as he left, the same one he still asked himself.

“Why am I here, runesmith?”

“Never seen a basilisk before, eh, boy?”

Erath barely heard the quartermaster, his attention consumed by the great, lumbering beast before him. A giant saurian, the basilisk’s green flesh was hard as iron, and bulging with bands of dense muscle from its tree-trunk limbs to its long, thick tail. It looked to Erath as though it could crush a man into a paste without ever realizing it had done so.

“What are you used to tending?” the quartermaster asked.

“Sheep,” Erath answered.

“Ah, don’t you fret,” the quartermaster clapped Erath on the back. “Just think of him like a big sheep, then. He’s still a baby so you’ll be fine with ’im. Time hasn’t made ’im mean, yet.”

“This,” Erath looked at the man, “is a baby?”

The quartermaster chuckled. “We use the bigguns to break down castle walls, son.”

Erath glanced at the requisitions order the runesmith had given him. Mercifully it was written in plain terms, mostly numbers, and the quartermaster had helped with anything he couldn’t understand. The basilisk would be carrying the better part of an entire campsite on its back, but it looked like they were carrying much more equipment than would be needed for three people, even with Arrel’s drakehounds.

“Everything in order?” Tifalenji appeared behind Erath. He noticed she was fully armored now, with her rune-etched sword on her back and a canvas rucksack at her feet.

“We’re getting him squared away,” replied the quartermaster. “Most everything but the waterskins are loaded, we’ll be takin’ care of that next and you’ll be on your way.”

“Good,” said the runesmith, checking the height of the sun. “We’ll link with the caravans leaving out the south entrance. We need to be on the road and clear of the city before sunfall.”

“The road?” Erath asked. Ever since he arrived at the capital, Erath had watched the armies and warbands of Noxus, including his own tribe, march to embark on great troop ships at the docks. “We won’t be traveling with the others across the sea?”

The runesmith shook her head. “No, we aren’t finished on the mainland, yet. There’s still someone we need to find first.”

They left the organized chaos of the capital behind. The towering silhouette of the Immortal Bastion lingered on the horizon as Erath, Arrel, and Tifalenji joined a massive procession of troops moving east across the southern steppe of Noxus. Like a gargantuan snake of red banners and dark iron they marched, traversing flat plains that reminded Erath of his home, back in Dalamor.

“There’s just too many of us,” a grizzled line sergeant had told Erath, waiting in the ration line as they camped one night. “The capital’s docks are huge and they could run them day and night—and they are—and it still wouldn’t be enough for the full mobilization.”

“That’s why we are going east?” Erath asked.

The sergeant grunted, smiling at his beaten tin cup as it was filled with stew and a hunk of hard brown bread. “While the rest of them get to share a damp boat’s innards with some rats for company, we get to stretch our legs a bit before we split off to berths across the coast.”

“And then where?” Erath nodded his thanks to the cook as he received his own portion. “Where are all of us going?”

“Nobody’s told you?” the line sergeant scoffed. “We’re going to Ionia, boy.”

Erath stumbled to a halt, his food nearly falling from numb fingers. He felt for his chest, finding the lump of the pendant he wore. Ionia.

“You’re holding up the line,” the sergeant frowned at him.

“The last time…” Erath said quietly. “The war. The empire, they levied half the men of my tribe to go fight.” He looked up at the sergeant. “None of them came back.”

“Sounds like you’re gonna get a chance to get some blood back.” The sergeant pulled the collar of his tunic down, revealing a wicked red scar that branched like lightning across his entire chest. “Magic. A lot of us got scores to settle over there, kid, and we’ve been patient. Now it’s time to collect.”

Erath offered the sergeant a thin smile he didn’t feel, and wandered back to his billet, suddenly not feeling hungry anymore.

The march continued on, brisk and uneventful. As the days went on, more segments of the battle train branched off, heading to ports they were assigned to deploy from. Erath continued to feel isolated from his companions, the runesmith Tifalenji aloof and Arrel hostile, so he focused instead on what he had been seconded from his tribe to do, and cared for the party’s hulking basilisk.

Despite the creature’s immense size and strength, the quartermaster back in the capital had been right. Erath found him docile and receptive to his care, something he hoped with time would extend to Arrel’s drakehounds, though he didn’t hang too much hope on that. The pack practically orbited the armored Noxian at all times, totally obedient to their alpha.

Erath had taken to calling the basilisk Talz, the name of his old herding dog when he had been a boy. The lumbering saurian responded to his new name as Erath led him to graze and kept him in line with the convoy.

A week into their journey, the runesmith gathered the party, announcing that while the main body was continuing east, they would be taking their own path down a southern branch.

“We make for the Bloodcliffs,” said Tifalenji, as Erath watched the convoy slowly shrink in the distance, still an unbroken column of Noxian warriors marching to the coast.

“What’s there?” he asked.

“Not what,” answered the runesmith, “but who.”

Erath nodded, remembering Tifalenji had mentioned someone else before. He looked back at the extra supplies loaded onto Talz’s back. “Who is it?”

“A haughty k’naad,” scoffed Arrel, pouring water from a flask into her palm to allow her hounds to drink. First’s ears perked up at the word, which Erath didn’t know but could guess as to its meaning. Arrel sneered at Tifalenji. “We are wasting our time, we don’t need her.”

“I’ll be the reckoner of that,” the runesmith replied flatly. She glanced at Erath, and sighed through her teeth. “Her name is Marit, blade squire.”

“Marit’s quite keen on reminding anyone within earshot that she was of the nobility before the revolution,” grumbled Arrel. “They stripped her family of their estate and power, though she hardly seems to realize that from talking to her.”

Arrel scanned the landscape. “She went on and on about these wondrous lands her family held.” She shook her head. “What a shithole.”

“She is an elite soldier,” countered Tifalenji. “Experienced and battle-tested. She will be an asset, and that is the end of this conversation.”

The road to the Bloodcliffs cut through arid plains and low, sunbaked hills. The heat was a new experience for Erath, far from the fog-blanketed chill of Dalamor. He took care to ration what water they had as they traveled beneath the glaring sun in a cloudless, blisteringly blue sky.

Arrel paused, and Erath patted Talz’s flank to bring him to a halt as he watched the tracker. She knelt, pressing a palm to the earth. “Something’s close.”

From atop Talz’s back, the runesmith drew a spyglass from her belt, extending the brass tube and looking through it. “Riders ahead,” she confirmed. “And they aren’t Noxian.”

Erath looked, seeing two tiny figures as they crested the top of a hill. He was just able to make out that they were on horseback. His pulse quickened, and his hand fell to the leather-wound haft of the short falchion at his hip. After so long on the road, day after day of monotony, the prospect of a skirmish was refreshingly welcome.

“Second, Third,” Arrel called, and the two drakehounds leapt forward.

“Wait,” said Tifalenji, now looking behind them. “There’s more.”

Erath turned, seeing more figures appear behind them, and then to either side. He barely heard the sharp note of a horn, as they descended the hills toward them.

“Raiders,” Tifalenji drew the runesword on her back. “Form a circle, now.”

The ground began to shake, soft at first but steadily climbing to thunder as the horsemen charged. Erath turned to Talz, trying to find some means to root him to the ground in case the basilisk panicked, and recoiled as Tifalenji struck him across the head.

“Focus!” she hissed.

Erath forgot Talz, pulling his falchion and gripping it tightly. He distanced himself from Arrel and the runesmith, trying to cover his third of the tiny perimeter they made. The raiders were in full view now, lightly armored with billowing cloaks and teal banners streaming from the tips of barbed lances.

The Noxians braced for the charge. Emerald fire lit the runes along Tifalenji’s blade. Arrel’s hounds howled.

At the last second, the horses peeled to either side, sprinting in a circle around them. The dust kicked up by their iron-shod hooves grew into a thick, whirling curtain, rising to cut them off from the world. Erath could just barely make out the silhouettes whipping around them.

The air whistled and Erath leapt to one side as a lance embedded itself where he’d just been standing. He heard Arrel bark a command and one of her hounds leapt into the dust. Tifalenji began chanting, the words hurting Erath’s ears as worms of green light shivered across her blade.

“Say-RAH-dech!” she roared, slashing with her blade and sending a wave of jade lightning through the wall.

Erath couldn’t tell if she hit anything. If Arrel’s hound was still alive. Everything was chaos. Noise. A keening wail split the air. The cyclone caging them shuddered. Erath heard something rip, and leapt back as a jet of dark blood burst from the wall of dust, coating his face and chest with hot crimson.

He stood there. Help them, you idiot.

The dust began to settle, and Erath summoned his courage. He focused on a shadow directly ahead of him and charged with falchion raised and the death cry of his tribe on his lips. He sprinted through the stinging grit, and as he opened his eyes he found what stood before him was no horse.

Whatever it was, its rider had a glaive at his throat in an instant.

“Now, now,” came a voice, smooth and cultured. “My dear steed feasted well today but she may yet have room for more.”

The speartip lifted Erath’s jaw, and he followed it up to the speaker. She was a tall, thin woman, her face hidden behind a mask of iron and black leather. A Noxian banner hung from her glaive, while a second tattered standard Erath didn’t recognize was gathered around her shoulders like a cloak.

She rode confidently upon a lithe, bipedal creature, all sleek muscle and lashing tail, somewhere between a lizard and a bird. Its vicious visage bared its blood-stained fangs in challenge. The dust had cleared now, revealing the dead raiders around them in various states of dismemberment.

Erath felt the penetrating gaze from behind the mask, studying him. Her eyes narrowed in amusement as she dipped her glaive to a dead raider, cutting his banner free with a flick of her wrist. Only then did he see the others dangling from her mount as Tifalenji and Arrel approached.

“Arrel, you icy k’naad!” the Noxian exclaimed, striding out confidently to meet the party. “Where did they dig you out of? Last I heard you were hunting bounties in that wretched stink-pit Zaun.” She shivered theatrically. “Like missing teeth, that city. Hideous!”

“Marit,” Arrel said flatly. Erath glanced at the tracker. Even for Arrel, the greeting seemed cold, and he saw something different in the steel grey of her eyes.

“And who are your friends here?” Marit regarded Erath and Tifalenji. “I find it hard to believe you would just happen to be passing through.”

“Hail,” said Tifalenji, dipping her head in greeting. “Your instincts are true enough. We come in the empire’s service. Our mandate.”

The runesmith handed Marit a scroll. The masked woman unfurled it, her dark eyes flicking up to regard Tifalenji several times as she read it.

“Under penalty of death,” Marit read dramatically, before handing the scroll back to Tifalenji. “Well this all seems to be in order. When do we leave?”

“Now,” answered Tifalenji.

“Fair enough,” Marit eyed Erath. “manservant, eh?”

He hesitated. “Uh, I’m a blade squi—”

“You may address me as ‘my lady,’ manservant,” Marit gestured to her mount. “And this is my glorious steed, the Lady Henrietta Eliza Vaspaysian IV of Orogonthis.” She looked at Erath, narrowing her eyes. “But you do appear quite stupid, so I suppose just Henrietta will suffice.”

Henrietta swung her long, muscled neck in Erath’s direction, breathing out a chittering hiss through her gleaming fangs.

“What does she eat?” asked Erath.

“People who get on my nerves,” said Marit as she turned away toward her pavilion. “Tend to her ends, little man, and speak when spoken to.”

Erath opened his mouth to reply, but Henrietta hissed again, and he bit down on his anger.

Together they worked quickly, striking Marit’s camp and loading it onto Talz. The basilisk bore the weight easily, as though he didn’t even notice the added burden. Erath was beginning to understand how a fully grown one could level fortifications.

“Is everything ready to move?” asked the runesmith.

Erath nodded, and she signaled for them to move. Marit leapt up into a polished leather saddle on Henrietta’s back, binding the Noxian banner to her glaive and the second standard around her neck like a cloak.

“Come on then, Talz!” Erath called, urging the basilisk from where it drank and munched on the soft grasses of the watering ground.

Marit cocked her head to one side. “Wait, he named our pack animal?”

“He did,” said Arrel.

Marit scoffed. “Well, I suppose we can use the idiot’s tears to season the meat when we have to eat it on the trail.”

“Those riders,” said Tifalenji, nodding in the direction where she had watched them vanish over the horizon.

“Yes?” Marit leaned down from her saddle. “What about them?”

“Aren’t you concerned they’ll simply go back to raiding in your absence?”

Marit waved her hand. “Nonsense. These are my ancestral lands. If they choose to be good stewards of them then fine, and if they don’t, I’ll just kill them all when I return. Worry gives you frown-lines.”

A few days’ ride took them from the Bloodcliffs. The runesmith kept their pace brisk, having the party sleep in shifts along the trail and only stopping when absolutely necessary. Erath saw her each night, either on the road or at camp, sitting apart from the others with her eyes intent upon the moon.

They skirted east across the base of low mountains before arriving at their port of call at the Drakkengate, at the first light of dawn. Erath found the docks there to be just as bustling as any other, mired in the same organized chaos of armed mobilization that seemed to be taking place over the entire eastern coast of Noxus. Thousands of warriors, and the countless armorers, cooks, builders, menders, priests, and forge-smiths that attended to them, filed into the holds of great troop ships, ready to unfurl immense crimson sails and dip their oars for the voyage across the sea.

Erath set about hunting down supplies as soon as they arrived. While the ships were already provisioned for soldiers and more common animals for the crossing, their party had accumulated a variety of exotic creatures he was now responsible for. Luckily for Erath, the mandate the runesmith carried granted them swift passage through the congested queues and overruled any of the more obstinate quartermasters. Before midday, they were ready to board.

“There,” Tifalenji pointed toward the docks. “That is our ship. The Atoniad.”

Erath’s eyes fell upon the vessel. The Atoniad was a troop carrier of unmistakably Noxian design, from its strong lines and dark iron plating to the tightly bound red sails, eager to be unleashed and carry the ship forward onto the waves. The largest boat he had ever embarked upon was the river skiff that had borne his tribe to the Immortal Bastion, and comparing that to the Atoniad was like comparing a toothpick to a battle axe.

Lines of men and women were already boarding, filing up gangplanks, while other wider ramps admitted animals and pallets of tools, stone, and lumber.

“I don’t see many soldiers,” said Erath.

“We’ll be traveling with mostly laborers and stonemasons,” said Tifalenji. “The Atoniad is bound for Fae’lor, not the main islands.”

“Fae’lor?” Erath glanced at the runesmith. “We go to the great fortress, then?”

“What’s left of it,” muttered Arrel.

Word had reached as far as Dalamor of the tragedy at Fae’lor. Erath had gathered with the tribe around a fire as the shamans relayed how a cowardly band of Ionians had assaulted the Noxian fortress there. In their desperation, they had unleashed magic that was beyond their power to control, wrecking horrific damage to the defenses, there.

A fortnight later, the tribe had received the call to carry their spears to the capital.

All of their spears.

“We embark,” said Tifalenji. She pointed to the wider access points. “Take the beasts and get them aboard, blade squire.”

Erath dipped his head, looking over at Arrel. “Shall I take the hounds as well?”

All four drakehounds glared at Erath. They somehow managed to snarl at him in the exact same pitch, at the exact same time. A chorus of angry jaws.

“They will remain with me,” Arrel snapped a finger and the pack fell silent.

Erath gathered up the reins for Talz. Marit handed over the reins to Henrietta, favoring her steed with a final caress down her jawline.

“Make sure the good lady has her own accommodations,” called Marit as Erath led the beasts toward the ship. “If you put anything else in with her, she’ll be alone soon enough.”

The open air was cold, and sharp with salt spray. Twelve other ships sailed beside the Atoniad in the squadron, their red sails full and taut with a generous wind that at least for now handled the duty of the oarsmen below decks. Gossip aboard amongst bored soldiers had spread the rumor that they had passed through pirate routes at some point the previous night, though few of them could imagine any corsair fool enough to try their luck against a dozen Imperial warships packed from bow to stern with war-edgy killers.

Erath turned from looking out across the squadron as Arrel approached, nearly saluting before remembering he had been told not to. Arrel ignored the awkwardness. She glanced down, noting how tightly the boy held on to the railing. “Your first passage?”

The blade squire nodded. “Three days at sea, and still another three, they say, until we get to Fae’lor.” He waved a hand at the endless span of churning grey waves stretching all the way to the horizon, broken only by the salt-shrouded shapes of the other warships. “I never thought there could be this much water.”

Arrel grunted, noncommittal.

“You were in the war before,” Erath said, uneasy with the subject. “Ionia, what is it like?”

Arrel did not answer him at once. The tracker stared out over the ocean, reaching down to scratch the sleek, leathery skin behind Second’s bony crestmask. She breathed slowly. “It is a place of beauty, and of death.”

“All of Ionia is just one giant jungle raptor with its head cut off,” Marit appeared from behind them, strutting forward to lounge against the railing. “We decapitated it last time, and now it’s just thrashing about, making a mess, too stupid to realize it’s already dead.”

“I’ve hunted raptors,” said Arrel. “And even headless they can still gut you.”

“So it is war, then?” asked Erath. “Another war with Ionia?”

Marit shrugged. “Damned if I know, but the Grand General sure shoved a lot of boots across the ocean just to rattle swords. Just hope he has enough backbone to let us finish what we start, this time.”

Arrel walked away, and Erath looked back at the fathomless expanse of gently crashing waves. “What is the name of this ocean?” he asked.

“Who cares what it’s called?” Marit leaned over Erath’s shoulder before she stalked off. “It’s ours.”

Erath had never been so grateful to see dry land.

The fortress of Fae’lor grew in size and definition on the horizon before them. The Atoniad had made speed in her voyage to the island, but Erath had discovered he was far from suited for a life on the seas. The heaving, rolling motion of their warship had stolen many meals from his stomach, offered to the ocean in the queasy tribute of abrupt sickness. Everything was soaked, coated in a crackling crust of salt that burned his skin.

He had kept below decks for the most part, ensuring that the creatures in his care endured the passage with as much comfort as he was able to offer. Talz seemed fine, eating regularly and spending the majority of the time in his pen, sleeping. Lady Henrietta, however, had required more diligent attention. A nimble and energetic beast, Marit’s steed was clearly unhappy with the confines of the ship. Erath took extra care during her feedings, to ensure he did not become the meal himself, and looked forward to getting Henrietta off the Atoniad where she could stretch her legs.

When the call for land had gone out from the scouts at the ship’s bow, Erath hurried above decks to see. The top deck was crowded with Noxians eager for their own view. At first it was little more than a smudge in the distance, faintly more defined than the hazy stripe where the water met the sky, but the closer they came, the more distinct it grew. Erath glimpsed what appeared to be banks of fog surrounding the island, tinted a ruddy brown that upon closer inspection became red.

Fae’lor was surrounded by Noxian ships.

There were concentric circles of vessels ringing the island, defense pickets that were constantly shifting. The Atoniad was halted by the outermost patrols, a pair of frigates that lashed themselves to the larger vessel with boarding hooks as squads of naval soldiers came aboard.

Erath noted their stern countenances as they inspected the troop ship, weapons in hand as they pored over the captain’s mandate and manifest. They scoured every deck, and the blade squire watched as a trio of robed blood mages studied every soldier onboard, softly chanting as they looked every man and woman in the eye.

“What are they looking for, mistress?” he asked Tifalenji.

“Signs of subterfuge,” replied the runesmith. “Deceptions. Wild magic.”

To Erath it all seemed strange. “But we are all Noxian soldiers, on an imperial ship. Does this not seem paranoid?”

“Patience, boy,” said Tifalenji. “When we dock at Fae’lor, you will understand.”

After they had been over every inch of the Atoniad, a contingent of the soldiery remained aboard while the others returned to their frigate, and the ship was cleared to advance to the next ring of the blockade. The inspections and checks repeated with each checkpoint, the guard detail rotating each time the Atoniad was stopped. Erath had been poked, prodded, and scrutinized so many times that when they finally had the harbor in sight, he questioned whether any of his own comrades trusted him, or anyone for that matter.

And then he got a better look at Fae’lor, and understood why.

The fortress had been gutted. He could make out only echoes of the great ramparts that had once stood at its heart, the formerly impregnable fortifications reduced to shattered remnants that rose from the ground like blackened, broken teeth. But the extent of the devastation went far beyond the walls and towers. The very land itself was broken open, torn apart and ripped out, bearing all the hallmarks of some incredible natural disaster.

The Atoniad drew up to her berth, and Noxians leapt to work both aboard and on the dock as soon as she came to a halt. Craftsmen rushed out to their assigned posts, while raw materials and supplies were offloaded and taken ashore. Erath went below decks, trying to put the shock of the island from his mind as he went about getting Talz and Henrietta off the Atoniad.

Standing out against the herds of livestock and more mundane pack animals, Erath led his beasts up a wide ramp leading from the ship’s hold. Waiting as those ahead of him were processed and allowed into Fae’lor, he stood transfixed as he watched crews descend over the wreckage of another warship like a swarm of furious ants.

Great winches and chains hauled the wreck up out of the water, a piece at a time. Teams scrambled down within, pulling out the pale, bloated shapes of the fallen in droves. She was more than twice the tonnage of the Atoniad, and her hull had been broken in two, like a stick over a man’s knee.

What kind of power could have possibly done such a thing?

Erath thought back to when he stood in the shadow of the Immortal Bastion. The certainty he felt there, seeing the empire marching to war, that there was nothing in creation that could possibly stand against them.

For the first time, seeing what had befallen Fae’lor with his own eyes, he felt doubt creep into his heart.

Finally he reached the end of the ramp, stepping from soaked wood onto cracked rock. The air was thick, humid, and dusty. It smelled of spice, things Erath couldn’t place as he realized, at long last, that he was there.

This was Ionia.

Erath lost track of how long he was standing there, or how the leather of Henrietta’s reins was sliding through his fingers. By the time he was aware of it, Marit’s mount was loping into the camp.

“Hey!” The blade squire started to pursue her, before looking back at Talz. “Stay,” he warned, drawing his knife and pinning the basilisk’s reins to the ground with it before sprinting after Henrietta.

“Whoa,” he called to the roving saurian as she stalked between a line of billet tents. She stopped, her long neck swiveling to regard Erath. Henrietta hissed at him through the gleaming metal of her chanfron, what Marit called “her jewelry.” Enclosing her face and skull, it was part protective helm, part weapon, accentuating her already vicious fangs with sharpened iron blades.

“Easy, my lady,” Erath coaxed, arms wide as he slowly closed the distance between them. “Easy, now.”

“Control that thing!” bellowed a voice from a group nearby. Both Henrietta and the blade squire shot them a hostile glare.

“She’s been cooped up on a ship for days,” Erath barked at the soldiers. He took advantage of Henrietta’s diverted attention and grabbed hold of her reins, wrapping the leather around his forearm. “She needs exercise, you want to be it? Then stay out of the way!”

Erath stared down the soldiers and watched them disperse, only registering after a time that the runesmith was calling for him. He went back to gather up Talz’s reins and guided his charges along, tugging the basilisk forward and holding Henrietta back as he headed toward where Tifalenji waited with Arrel and Marit. He saw new tension in the runesmith’s companions as he approached, a tightness in their postures that hadn’t been there before.

“Take your time,” Marit sneered, snatching Henrietta’s reins from Erath. Arrel squatted down, fingers brushing over the rubble strewn over the ground as her drakehounds orbited her.

“This was old magic,” muttered the tracker. “Something long-sleeping, now roused.”

“Where did you learn to sense magic?” Marit arced a skeptical eyebrow.

“Here,” Arrel answered, barely above a whisper.

“Oh joy,” replied Marit. She glanced at Tifalenji expectantly. “Well?”

“The last member of our expedition is here, at Fae’lor,” the runesmith replied. “We simply need to find her.”

“Just look for a dueling pit,” said Arrel. “She won’t be far from the scent of blood.”

Erath nodded, growing accustomed to gleaning what he could from inferences and cryptic words. “Does she have a beast that I am to care for as well?”

“Oh, manservant,” Marit shook her head. “Teneff? She is the beast.”

Arrel was right. While Fae’lor was in the midst of its reconstruction, it still remained a Noxian military camp. They followed the sound of ringing steel, sharper than the rhythm coming from the forges’ hammers, leading them to where the warriors on the island trained.

Past rows of billet tents were dug a series of shallow pits, each of them occupied by a pair of dueling soldiers. With blunted swords, wooden staves, or bare hands they sparred, but one in particular had attracted a crowd. The party had to muscle their way through the watching soldiers to catch a glimpse into the pit.

Two Noxians circled each other in full war-plate. One wielded a training sword and buckler, the other a heavy iron hook mounted on a length of chain. The soldiers watching cheered the pair as they measured distance and exchanged feints.

The swordsman sensed an opening. He lunged forward, flicking his buckler into his opponent’s face while slashing low with his sword. The other fighter leapt back, just shy of the blade, while throwing her hooked chain to ensnare the man’s shield arm. She whipped her arm down, wrenching the swordsman forward into a brutal headbutt. He dropped to the mire like a stone, blood spraying from a ruined nose.

“That’s first blood to me,” she crowed, and the onlookers erupted in cheers.

“That was dirty, Teneff,” the swordsman snarled, pawing blood from his mashed nose with a wicked laugh. “Let’s make it second blood. I’m not done with you yet.”

“First blood was the agreement,” Teneff repeated, with no compromise in her voice. “We need you in the line, Cestus.”

The swordsman barked out a swear and stood, trudging up out of the pit. Teneff wound her chain around her forearm, looking up to find Erath and the party staring down at her. Her eyes widened in confusion. “Marit? Arrel?”

Marit chuckled. “Still cracking skulls, eh, Ten?”

Teneff spat a gobbet of phlegm onto the ground. “Some of us never stopped,” she said with a grin, taking the hand Arrel offered her to pull her up out of the pit.

Erath backed out of her way as she climbed out. Teneff bore the hallmarks of a shield-breaker, a warrior of the line at home when her enemy was within arm’s reach. Scars crisscrossed any flesh not covered in leather and iron armor, tales of blood and honor etched into her over a lifetime of battle. He wondered how many of the scars she bore were earned here in Ionia.

“The last time I saw either of you,” said Teneff, “we were all—”

“Here,” said Marit. Quiet descended between the soldiers for a few moments. There was a bond between them, Erath could see that clearly. But there was a void there as well, something unspoken, or even missing. He had lived around soldiers long enough to know not to prod.

“Well,” said Teneff, breaking the silence. “If you’re all coming from Valoran, then you’ve been eating ship’s slop for days. Our cook’s no artist, but they’re a damn sight better than that. Come.”

The sun had begun to sink into the horizon, painting the sky in dappled bands of gold, orange, and scarlet, drifting down into indigo. They made their way through the mess tent and then found seats around a fire as the air started to chill. The women talked amongst themselves, of what they had done since last they served beside each other, and of the old wounds endured together. Erath remained silent, and listened.

“And you, boy,” said Teneff, her attention shifting to the blade squire. “You blooded? Fought your principal yet?”

Erath straightened. “I served my principal, yes.”

Her aspect became serious, analytical. “Where?”

“It was a border skirmish west of the Dalamor plains,” Erath answered. “A quick action, pretty light.” He looked to each of them, seeing that his answer had not been enough. This was not the ignorant voyeurism of the civilian, eager to satisfy some fanciful idea of what it was like to fight in a war they would never experience. These were veterans, warriors who may find themselves beside him in the line, needing to know what he had seen and how he had carried himself.

“It was a shallow expansion through a fertile valley,” he continued. “They were big boys, farming stock, but they were brought up to till the soil, not turn it red. Once we got within a rapid drumbeat, running charge, we closed, rolled up their right side double fast. Opened them up quite quickly.”

“Any of them left afterward,” asked Arrel, “to till that soil?”

Erath shook his head. “We tried. After their elders came around, we brought in others to help them take up the work. Harvest needed planting, no time to wait.”

Marit tilted her head. “And how many of those big farm boys did you make the soil red with, eh?”

“Leave it alone,” said Tifalenji.

“I was rearguard,” Erath shrugged. “By the time the lines rotated to me, they were already broken. We mostly just finished off those too wounded to save, and dug graves.”

The memory surfaced in Erath’s mind without asking. Trudging through the aftermath of a broken shield wall, feeling someone take hold of his ankle. Looking down, seeing a man who had taken a spear thrust to the belly, croaking at him in words he didn’t know, but a message he understood clear enough.

Putting his speartip to the man’s throat. The man tilting his head back to accept it.

“When was this?” asked Teneff.

“This past spring,” Erath answered.

“An infant!” exclaimed Marit.

“I said leave it alone,” the runesmith growled. “He’s here to tend beasts, nothing more.”

Marit chuckled, her eyes narrowed in amusement. Teneff eyed Tifalenji. “What of you then, rune-shaper? Where have you served?”

“Far from here,” she answered, and the odd light in her eyes convinced Erath that was as much as they would hear of her experiences.

Sleep was a glorious thing to a soldier. Any span of uninterrupted rest was precious, rivaling a full belly or a pair of well-made boots to a fighting man or woman. Erath had tried to adjust to the endless rolling and pitching of the Atoniad, but sleep had only come to him in fits and starts. Back on solid ground, with his cloak laid out on a flat, dry patch near the animal pens and his duties done, the blade squire rested his head against his pack and savored the prospect of sleeping through the next handful of hours before the early morning feedings came.

It felt as though he had no more than blinked before he heard the voice, sharp and cold as the edge of the knife he felt against his neck.

“Do as I say, in silence, or I will cut your throat.”

Erath opened his eyes. Dawn’s light was still hours away, the moon a thin silver sickle overhead as he was jerked to his feet. His knife had been taken. They walked, Erath careful to keep his movements slow and hands in view as he was led to the edge of the camp.

A huddle of figures stood ahead. He heard the low snarling of hounds as they approached, the silhouettes materializing into Arrel and Marit with the kneeling figure of the runesmith between them.

“What are you doing in Ionia, boy?” demanded the voice as Erath was shoved to his knees beside Tifalenji. He was alert enough to recognize the voice behind him as Teneff’s.

“I—”

“He knows nothing,” said Tifalenji calmly. Teneff lifted the knife from Erath’s throat and rounded upon the runesmith.

“And what do we know about you, eh?” Teneff looked to her fellow veterans. “Documents can be forged, mandates concocted.”

“My mandate is quite genuine,” said Tifalenji, her calm eerie to Erath, “as is the power you are flirting with opposing.”

Marit tilted her head. “Does the boy even know who you say you’re hunting? Who you would have us hunt?”

“He knows what has been necessary for him to know, and nothing more.”

“Then perhaps it’s time he knew,” Teneff looked down at Erath. “You seek a ghost. A warrior who died in honor as a hero to Noxus. Our comrade.” She gestured to Arrel and Marit. “Our sister!”

“She lives,” said the runesmith.

“Lies!” Teneff hissed. “Tell me why I should believe a word from your mouth and not kill you right here?”

“Because the powers to which I answer do not make those mistakes. If they say she lives, then she lives. You all served alongside her in service of the empire. Now the empire commands that we find her, and bring her back to them. My authority supersedes that of the garrisons here, they do not know of our task, nor shall they.”

“What proof do you have of any of this?” demanded Marit.

“Her blade,” Tifalenji sighed. The women stiffened.

“What of it?” hissed Teneff.

“Did you know she tried to destroy it?” asked the runesmith. She drew in a deep breath, and her eyes pulsed emerald. “She failed, and the magic that infused it cried out at the desecration. My masters heard it, and they saw who was responsible, as clearly as if they were standing in the room with her. That is how we know.”

“If she yet lives,” said Teneff, “then she is a deserter, the very crime you now ask us all to commit. The punishment for which is death.”

Tifalenji met Teneff’s withering gaze. “Succeed in this task, aid me in hunting her down and return her for judgment in Noxus, and no censure will befall you. Look into yourselves, all that you sacrificed in this place, and tell me that her treason does not wound you. Tell me you would turn your backs on seeing justice done, and the wayward answer for the life she has led these past years.”

A dark silence hung over the gathering. Tension radiated from Teneff, Marit, and Arrel, the threat of violence balanced on a knife’s edge. Erath fought his nerves, the simmering rage of secrets and the idea he may die here, on Fae’lor, with no inkling at all as to why.

“We will go with you.”

All eyes fell on Arrel, her first words since Erath had been brought to them. Marit rounded on the tracker. “You speak for all of us, now?”

“I do,” Arrel said flatly. She cleared her throat, the effort sounding almost pained to Erath. “Because we are soldiers, all of us. And a soldier does their duty. But more than that, she was a sister to us. And sisters deserve answers.”

Marit glared at Arrel, her dark eyes slits of intensity, but she relented. “Answers,” she repeated.

Teneff gritted her teeth, looking to the other veterans who gave her solemn nods. She hauled the runesmith to her feet by her collar, but did not release her. “At the first inkling that what you have told us here are lies, witch, I will take your head.”

“I speak only the truth,” answered Tifalenji. “And more now that we can tarry no longer than we already have. We must cross into the heart of the First Lands, and we must do so now.”

Tifalenji looked to Erath now for the first time. “What I have said to them bears the same truth to you, blade squire. Go with us along this path, attend and serve, and you will be rewarded.”

“I am a loyal warrior of Noxus,” Erath proclaimed. “I do my duty, and need not shadowy promises or the threat of a slit throat to do it. The empire bids I serve you, so I do. I only ask one question.”

Tifalenji regarded Erath soberly. “Ask it.”

“Who is it?” asked Erath. “Who are we hunting?”

The runesmith drew her sword. “She may call herself something different now, some adoptive name for her new life in the First Lands.”

The runes Erath had watched her etch along the blade leapt from the iron into the sky, like a trail leading off into the dark mystic land that loomed ahead of them.

“But in Noxus, her name was Riven.”

The Butcher Blades had hung the Jackdaw from a rusted marlinspike through his jawbone and left him for the quayside scavengers. This was the seventeenth murdered ganger the hooded man had seen tonight.

A slow night by Bilgewater's standards.

At least since the Corsair King had fallen.

Red-fanged wharf rats had already eaten most of the hanged man's feet and were perched on stacked kreels to tear at the soft meat of his calves.

The hooded man kept on walking.

“Help. Me.”

The words were wet, squeezed up through a throat clogged with blood. The hooded man spun, hands reaching towards the weapons slung on his wide belt.

Incredibly, the Jackdaw was still alive on the bone-handled spike. The Hooks stuck it deep into the wooden frame of a loading crane. No way to get the Jackdaw down without tearing his skull to splinters.

“Help. Me,” he said again.

The hooded man paused, considering the Jackdaw's request.

“What for?” he said at last. “Even if I get you down from there, you will be dead by morning.”

The Jackdaw carefully lifted his hand to a concealed pocket in his patchwork jerkin and removed a golden Kraken. Even in the dim light, the hooded man saw it was genuine.

The scavengers hissed and raised their hackles as he approached. Wharf rats weren't large, but meat as warm as this wasn't a prize to be surrendered lightly. They bared long, needle-like fangs, spitting diseased gobbets of saliva.

He kicked one rat out over the water. He crushed a second underfoot. They snapped and bit, but nimble footwork kept any from tasting his flesh, his every movement smooth and precise. He killed another three before the rest scattered to the shadows, sullen eyes glaring red in the darkness.

The hooded man stood beside the Jackdaw. His features were hidden, but the light of a rogue’s moon suggested a face that no longer smiled.

“Death is here for you,” he said. “Embrace it, safe in the knowledge I will ensure it is final.”

He reached into his coat and withdrew a glittering spike of silver. Two handspans long and engraved with curling symbols spiraling along its length, it resembled an ornate, leather-worker's awl. He placed the tip under the dying man's chin.

The man's eyes widened and his hand scrabbled at the hooded man's sleeve as he looked out over the vast expanse of ocean. The sea was a black mirror shimmering with the glow of myriad candles, quayside braziers and lamplight warped through salvaged glass from a thousand cliffside-hulks.

“You know what lurks over the horizon,” he said. “You know the horror it brings. And yet you tear at each other like rabid beasts. It makes no sense to me.”

He turned and hammered the heel of his palm against the flattened haft of the awl, driving the spike up into the man's brain. A last corpse rattle and the Jackdaw's pain ended. The gold coin fell from the dead man's fingers and rolled into the ocean with a soft splash.

The man withdrew the spike and wiped it clean on the Jackdaw's ragged shirt. He returned it to the sheath inside his coat and removed a golden needle and a length of silver thread dipped in waters drawn from an Ionian spring.

Working with the skill of one who had performed this service many times before, he sewed the man's eyes and lips shut. As he worked, he spoke words taught to him a lifetime ago, words first ill-spoken by a long dead king.

“Now the dead cannot claim you,” he said as he finished his work and replaced his implements.

“Maybe not, but we ain't leaving empty-handed, sure we ain't,” said a voice behind the hooded man.

He turned and pulled back his hood to reveal skin the color and texture of aged mahogany, cheekbones that were angular and patrician. His dark hair was bound in a long scalp-lock and eyes that had seen horror beyond measure surveyed the newcomers.

Six men. Dressed in aprons of blood-stiffened leather cut to display limbs of corded muscle wrapped with tattooed thorns. Each carried a serrated hook and wore belts hung with a variety of meat-workers’ knives. Petty thugs made bold by the fall of the tyrant who'd ruled Bilgewater with an iron fist. With him gone, the city was in chaos as rival gangs sought to carve out fresh territories.

Their approach hadn’t been stealthy. Hobnailed boots, offal-stench and muttered curses had announced their presence long before they'd revealed themselves.

“I don't mind a coin going to the Bearded Lady, sure I don't,” said the biggest of the Butchers, a man with a gut so prodigious it was a wonder he could get close enough to a carcass to gut it at all. “But one of ours killed Old Knock John there, fair and square, sure they did. So that gold serpent there was ours.”

“Do you want to die here?” asked the man.

The fat man laughed.

“You know who you're talking to?”

“No. Do you?”

“Go on then, tell me so I can carve it on the rock I'll use to sink your bones.”

“My name is Lucian,” he said, whipping back his long frock coat and drawing a pair of pistols wrought of knapped stone and burnished metals unknown to even the most reckless alchemists of Zaun. A bolt of coruscating light punched the fat Butcher from his feet with a scorched hole where his grotesquely swollen heart had been.

Lucian's second pistol was smaller, more finely crafted, and fired a searing line of yellow fire that cut another of the Butchers in half from collarbone to groin.

Like the wharf rats before, they fled, but Lucian picked them off one by one. Each burst of light was a killing shot. In the blink of an eye all six Butchers lay dead.

He sheathed his pistols and pulled the coat back around him. Others would be drawn by the sound and fury of his work, and he had no time to save these men’s souls from what was coming.

Lucian sighed. It had been a mistake to stop for the Jackdaw, but perhaps the man he had once been was not entirely lost. A memory threatened to surface and he shook his head.

“I cannot be him again,” said Lucian.

He isn't strong enough to kill the Chain Warden.

Olaf’s frostscale hauberk was covered in blood and viscera. He grunted as he swung his axe one-handed. Bone sheared and muscle parted before the weapon, its blade quenched on a bed of True Ice deep in the farthest reaches of the Freljord.

Bearing a spitting torch in one hand, he waded through the dripping innards of the Krakenwyrm, hewing deeper with every swing. It had taken him three hours to reach this far; cleaving through its enormous glistening organs and dense bones.

True, the beast was already dead, skewered a week ago after a month’s long chase down from the north. Over thirty harpoons cast by strong arms and broad backs from the deck of Winter's Kiss pierced its scaled hide, but it had been Olaf's spear that finally ended its fight.

Killing the beast in the heart of a churning storm outside Bilgewater had been exhilarating, and for one brief moment – as the ship heeled over and almost tossed him into the beast's maw – he'd thought this might be the moment he would achieve the glorious death he sought.

But then Svarfell the helmsman, curse his mighty shoulder, centered the rudder to right the ship.

And, sadly, Olaf had lived. Another day closer to the terror of dying peacefully in his bed as a greybearded ancient.

They'd berthed in Bilgewater, hoping to sell the carcass and strip it of battle trophies; vast teeth, black blood that burned like oil, and titanic rib-bones fit to roof his mother’s hall.

His fellow tribesmen, exhausted from the hunt, were sleeping aboard Winter's Kiss, but Olaf, ever impatient, could not rest. Instead, he took up his glittering axe and set to work in dismembering the colossal monster.

Finally he saw the beast’s inner maw, a ribbed gullet large enough to swallow a clan whole or crush a thirty-oar Longreaver in a single bite. Its teeth were chiseled fangs like obsidian boulders.

Olaf nodded. “Yah. Fit to ring a hearth circle of the wind-walkers and the readers of bones and ash.”

He jammed the spiked base of the torch into the meat of the Krakenwyrm’s flesh and set to work, hacking at the jawbone until a tooth came loose. Hooking the axe to his belt, Olaf lifted it clear and set it upon his shoulder, grunting at the enormous weight.

“Like a Frost Troll gathering ice for his lair,” he said, making his way out of the beast’s innards, wading knee-deep in blood and caustic digestive juices.

Eventually he emerged from the giant wound in the Krakenwyrm’s rear and drew in a lungful of slightly fresher air. Even after the innards of the beast, Bilgewater was a rank soup of smoke and sweat and dead things. Its air was heavy with the smell of too many people living packed together like swine in a midden.

He spat a rank mouthful and said, “The sooner I am in the north the better.”

The air of the Freljord was so sharp it could cut you to the bone. Every breath here tasted of rancid milk and spoiled meat.

“Hey!” shouted a voice over the water.

Olaf squinted through the gloom, seeing a lone fisherman rowing out to sea beyond a line of floating water markers hung with dead birds and bells.

“That beast just shit you out?” shouted the fisherman.

Olaf nodded and said, “I had no gold to pay passage on a ship, so I let it swallow me in the Freljord and bear me south.”

The fisherman grinned and drank from a cracked bottle of blue glass. “I’d sit and listen to that tall tale, right enough!”

“Come to the Winter’s Kiss and ask for Olaf,” he shouted. “We’ll share a keg of Gravöl and honor the beast with songs of doom.”

The air around the White Wharf usually smelled of gull-crap and rotten fish. Today it tasted of scorched meat and woodsmoke, a flavor with which Miss Fortune was coming to associate with ever more of Gangplank’s men dying. Ash darkened the sky and reeking fumes drifted westwards from burning vats of rendered leviathan blubber on the Slaughter Docks. Miss Fortune's mouth felt greasy, and she spat onto the crooked timbers of the wharf. The water below was scummed with residue expelled by the thousands of corpses sunk beneath the water over the years.

“You and your men had a busy night,” she said, nodding toward the smoke rising from the western cliffs.

“Aye, that we did,” agreed Rafen. “Plenty more of Gangplank’s men going under today.”

“How many did you get?” asked Miss Fortune.

“Another ten of his Cragside lads,” said Rafen. “And the Boneyard Scallys won’t be bothering us again.”

Miss Fortune nodded in approval and turned to look at the ornate bronze cannon laid on the quayside.

Jackknife Byrne lay inside the barrel, finally dead from the gutshot he'd taken on the day everything changed; the day the Dead Pool exploded in full view of Bilgewater.

A gunshot meant for her.

Now it was time for Byrne to go down among the dead men and she owed it to him to be there to see him go under. Around two hundred men and women had come to pay their respects; her own lieutenants, Byrne's old gang members, and strangers she thought might be former crewmen or curious gawkers hoping to see the woman who'd brought down Gangplank.

Byrne said he'd once run his own ship, a two-masted brigantine that was the terror of the Noxian coast, but she only had his word for that. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn't, but in Bilgewater, more often than not the truth was far stranger than any tale spun by the city’s many chanty-men.

“I see you got them fighting each other out on the Slaughter Docks as well,” said Miss Fortune, brushing particles of ash from her lapels. Long red hair spilled from beneath a tricorn hat and gathered on the shoulders of her formal frock coat.

“Yeah, wasn’t hard to turn the Rat Town Dogs and Wharf Kings against each other,” said Rafen. “Ven Gallar's always had his eye on that patch. Says Travyn's boys took it from his old man a decade ago.”

“That true?”

“Who knows?” said Rafen. “Don’t matter, no-how. Gallar would say anything to get control of that part of the docks. I just helped him along.”

“Not much left to control over there now.”

“No,” agreed Rafen with a grin. “They pretty much killed the hell out of each other. Don't reckon we'll get trouble from either of them gangs any time soon.”

“Another week like this and there won't be any of Gangplank’s people left alive.”

Rafen gave her a strange look and Miss Fortune pretended not to notice.

“Come on, let's get Byrne sunk,” said Miss Fortune.

They walked over to the cannon, ready to roll it into the sea. A forest of wooden markers dotted the scummed surface of the water, ranging from simple wooden discs to elaborate sculptures of sea wyrms.

“Anyone want to say anything?” said Miss Fortune.

Nobody did, and she nodded to Rafen, but before they could tip the cannon into the water, a booming voice echoed over the wharf.

“I bring words for him.”

Miss Fortune turned to see a giant of a woman clad in colorful robes and acres of fabric striding down the docks towards them. A posse of tattooed menfolk accompanied her; a dozen youths armed with tooth-bladed spears, wide-mouthed pistols and hooked clubs. They swaggered like the cocksure gangers they were, standing with their priestess like they owned the docks.

“Seven hells, what's she doing here?”

“Did Illaoi know Byrne?”

“No. She knows me,” said Miss Fortune. “I heard that her and Gangplank used to...you know?”

“Really?”

“So the scuttlebutt goes.”

“By the Bearded Lady, no wonder Okao's men have been giving us such a hard time these last few weeks.”

Illaoi carried a heavy stone sphere that looked as if it weighed about as much as the Syren's anchor. The towering priestess carried it everywhere she went, and Miss Fortune assumed it was some kind of totem. What everyone else called the Bearded Lady, they called something virtually unpronounceable.

Illaoi produced a peeled mango from somewhere and took a bite. She noisily chewed the fruit with her mouth open and looked down the barrel of the cannon.

“A Bilgewater man deserves a blessing of Nagakabouros, yes?”

“Why not?” said Miss Fortune. “He's going down to meet the goddess, after all.”

“Nagakabouros doesn't live in the depths,” said Illaoi. “Only foolish paylangi think that. Nagakabouros is in everything we do that moves us along our path.”

“Yeah, how stupid of me,” said Miss Fortune.

Illaoi spat the fibrous mango pit into the water and swung the stone idol around like a giant cannonball, holding it up in front of Miss Fortune.

“You're not stupid, Sarah,” said Illaoi with a laugh. “But you don't even know what you are, what you've done.”

“Why are you really here, Illaoi? Is this about him?”

“Ha! Not even a little bit,” snorted Illaoi. “My life is for Nagakabouros. A god or a man? What choice is that?”

“None at all,” said Miss Fortune. “Bad luck for Gangplank.”

Illaoi grinned, exposing a mouthful of pulped mango.

“You're not wrong,” she said with a slow nod, “but you still don't hear. You let a razor-eel off the hook and you ought to stamp on its neck and walk away before it sinks its fangs into you. Then your motion will be gone forever.”

“What does that mean?”

“Come and see me when you figure it out,” said Illaoi, holding out her hand. Nestled in her palm was a pendant of pink coral arranged in a series of curves radiating from a central hub like a single, unblinking eye.

“Take it,” said Illaoi.

“What is it?”

“A token of Nagakabouros to guide you when you’re lost.”

“What is it really?”

“Nothing more than I say.”

Miss Fortune hesitated, but too many people were gathered for her to openly offend a priestess of the Bearded Lady by refusing her gift. She took the pendant and removed her tricorn to loop the leather thong around her neck.

Illaoi leaned in to whisper.

“I don’t think you're stupid,” she said. “Prove me right.”

“Why do I care what you think?” said Miss Fortune.

“Because a storm is coming,” said Illaoi, nodding at something over Miss Fortune's shoulder. “You know the one, so you best be ready to turn your prow into the waves.”

She turned and kicked Byrne's cannon from the dock. It splashed down hard and sank in a froth of bubbles before the fatty surface residue reformed, leaving only its bobbing marker cross to indicate who was below.

The priestess of the Bearded Lady marched back the way she had come, towards her temple in the cliff-crater, and Miss Fortune turned her gaze out to sea.

A storm was brewing way out in the deep ocean, but that wasn't where Illaoi had been looking.

She'd been looking towards the Shadow Isles.

Nobody ever fished Bilgewater Bay at night.

Piet knew why, of course; he’d known these waters all his life. The currents were treacherous, hull-splitting rocks lurked just below the surface, and the seabed was littered with the wrecks of ships whose captains had not accorded the sea its proper respect. But, more importantly, everyone knew the spirits of those drowned at sea were lonely and wanted others to join them.

Piet knew all this, but still needed to feed his family.

With Captain Jerimiad’s ship burned to cinders in the crossfire between Gangplank and Miss Fortune, Piet had no work and no coin to pay for food.

He’d drunk half a bottle of Scuttler’s Scrumpy just to pluck up the courage to push his boat out onto the water tonight, and the prospect of sharing a drink with the giant Freljordian helped steady his nerves.

Piet took another slug from the bottle, tugging the scruff of hair on his chin, then pouring a measure over the side to honor the Bearded Lady.

Warmed and numbed by the liquor, Piet rowed past the warning buoys and their dead birds until he came to a stretch of ocean where he’d had some luck the previous night. Jeremiad always said he had a nose for where the fish were biting, and he had a feeling they’d be gathering where the remains of the Dead Pool had drifted.

Piet pulled in the oars and stowed them before finishing off the Scrumpy. Then, making sure to leave a last mouthful in the bottle, he tossed it out to sea. With tired, drink-addled fingers he baited his hooks with grubs he’d scooped from a dead man’s eye and tied his lines to the gunwale cleats.

He closed his eyes and bent over the side of the boat, placing both hands in the water.

“Nagakabouros,” he said, hoping that using the natives’ name for the Bearded Lady might grant him a bit of luck, “I ain’t asking for much. Please help this poor fisherman and spare him a few morsels from your larder. Watch over me and keep me safe. And if I die in your embrace, keep me down among the dead men.”

Piet opened his eyes.

A pale face stared back at him, wavering just below the surface. It shimmered with cold, lifeless light.

He cried out and jerked back into his boat as, one by one, his fishing lines were pulled taut. They spun his boat around as thin coils of mist rose from the water. The mist thickened swiftly and soon the light from Bilgewater’s cliffs was lost to the darkness as coal-dark fog rolled in from the sea.

A cacophony of once-dead birds squawked from the warning markers, followed by the clamor of bells as their convulsing bodies swung the buoys back and forth.

The black mist...

Piet scrambled for his oars, fumbling in terror to fit them to the rowlocks. The mist was numbingly cold, and lines of necrotic black threaded his skin at its touch. He wept as the grave’s chill frosted his spine.

“Bearded Lady, Mother Below, Nagakabouros,” he sobbed. “Please guide me home. Please, this I beg of-”

Piet never finished his plea.

A pair of hook-headed chains erupted from his chest, droplets of vividly red blood streaming from their tips. A third hook punched through his belly, another his throat. A fifth and sixth gouged his palms and pulled them down hard, pinning Piet to his boat.

Agony surged through him and he screamed as a figure of purest malice emerged from the black mist. Emerald fire haloed its horned skull, and sockets gouged by vengeful spirits burned as they savored his pain.

The dead spirit was robed in ancient black vestments, and rusted keys scraped at its side. A chained corpse-lantern moaned and swayed with monstrous appetite from its clenched fist.

The glass of the infernal lantern opened to receive him, and Piet felt his spirit tear loose from the warmth of his flesh. The wails of tortured souls shrieked from its depths, maddened by their unending purgatory. Piet fought to keep his spirit within his body, but a spectral blade scythed and his time in the world was ended as the glass of the lantern snapped shut.

“A wretched soul you are,” said the reaper of his life, its voice like gravel on a tombstone. “But only the first to be claimed by Thresh this night.”

The black mist rippled, and the silhouettes of malefic spirits, howling wraiths and ghostly horsemen swelled within.

The darkness boiled across the sea and swept onto land.

And the lights in Bilgewater started to go out.

Miss Fortune snapped the barrels of her pistols shut and laid them down on the table next to her short-bladed sword. Scores of frantic bells and shouts of alarm echoed from the panicked city below; she knew well what they signified.

The Harrowing.

In defiance of the incoming storm, she’d kept the shuttered windows of her newly-acquired villa open, daring the dead to come for her. Muttering winds carried their hunger and a cold that settled bone-deep.

Perched high on Bilgewater’s eastern cliffs, the villa had once belonged to a hated gang leader. In the chaos of Gangplank’s fall, he’d been dragged from his bed and had his brains bashed out on the cobbles.

Now it belonged to Miss Fortune, and she’d be damned if she’d go the same way. She reached up and ran a fingertip around the curves of the pendant Illaoi had given her at Byrne’s sinking. The coral was warm to the touch, and though she didn’t truly believe in what it represented, it was a pretty enough bauble.

The door to her chamber opened and she let the pendant drop.

She knew who was behind her without turning. Only one man would dare enter without knocking.

“What are you doing?” asked Rafen.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Like you’re about to do something damned stupid.”

“Stupid?” said Miss Fortune, placing her hands on the table. “We shed blood and lost good people to bring down Gangplank. I’m not going to let the Harrowing just-”

“Just what?”

“Take this place from me,” she snapped lifting her pistols and jamming them into their custom tooled hip-scabbards. “And you’re not going to stop me.”

“We’re not here to stop you.”

Miss Fortune turned to see Rafen at the threshold of her chambers. A score of her best fighters waited in the vestibule beyond, armed to the teeth with a mixture of muskets, wheel-lock pistols, clanking bundles of clay splinter-bombs and cutlasses that looked like they’d been looted from a museum.

“Looks like you’re about to do something damned stupid as well,” she said.

“Aye,” agreed Rafen, walking over to the open window and slamming the shutters closed. “You really think we’d let our captain go out to face that alone?”

“I almost died bringing Gangplank down, and I’m not done yet. I don’t expect you to go with me, not tonight,” said Miss Fortune coming to stand before her men and resting her hands on the carved walnut grips of her guns. “This isn’t your fight.”

“Course it bloody is,” said Rafen.

Miss Fortune took a breath and nodded.

“There’s every chance we won’t live to see morning,” she said, unable to keep the hint of a smile tugging at her lip.

“This ain’t our first Harrowing together, Captain,” said Rafen, tapping the skull pommel of his sword. “And I’ll be damned if it’s our last.”

Olaf was in sight of the Winter’s Kiss when he heard the screams. He ignored them at first – screams were nothing new in Bilgewater – but then he saw men and women running from the quayside in terror, and his interest was piqued.

They scrambled from their boats and fled for the crooked streets as fast as they could. They didn’t look back and they didn’t stop, not even when a shipmate tripped or fell into the water.

Olaf had seen men run from battle, but this was something else. This was naked terror, the kind he’d only ever seen etched on the frozen corpses spat out by glaciers where the Ice Witch was said to dwell.

Shutters were slamming shut all across the wharf and the strange symbols he’d seen on every door were frantically being dusted with white powder. Enormous winches were lifting timber structures formed from bolted-together hulls of ships high up the cliffs.

He recognized a tavern-keeper who ran a drinking den where the beer was only slightly stronger than troll piss and waved to him.

“What’s going on?” shouted Olaf.

The tavern-keeper shook his head and pointed to the ocean before slamming his door. Olaf set the Krakenwyrm’s tooth on the stone wharf and turned to see what all the fuss was about.

At first he thought a storm was coming in, but it was just thick black sea fog, albeit fog that approached with unnatural speed and fluid motion.

“Ah, now,” he said, unhooking his axe from his belt. “This looks promising.”

The feel of the weapon’s battle-worn leather grip was pleasing in his callused palm as he passed it from hand to hand, rolling his shoulders to loosen the muscles.

The black mist swept over the farthest ships and Olaf’s eyes widened as he saw spirits plucked from the blackest nightmares writhing in the mist. A towering dreadknight, a monstrous chimera of warhorse and man, led them alongside a black-clad reaper limned in green fire. These lords of the dead left the spirit host to their sport on the quayside as they flew into Bilgewater proper with predatory speed.

Olaf had heard the natives speak in hushed whispers of something called the Harrowing, a time of doom and darkness, but hadn’t expected to be lucky enough to face it axe in hand.

The host of the dead tore into the wallowing galleys, merchantmen, and corsair ships with claw and fang, ripping them apart like an ursine with its snout in a fresh kill. Sailcloth tore and rigging lines snapped as easily as rotten sinew. Heavy masts splintered as boats were tossed into one another and smashed to kindling.

A host of screaming wraiths flew into the Winter’s Kiss and Olaf roared in anger as the Longreaver’s keel heaved and split, its timbers freezing solid in a heartbeat. The boat sank as swiftly as if its hold were filled with rocks, and Olaf saw his fellow Freljordians dragged below the water by creatures with cadaverous limbs and fish-hooked mouths.

“Olaf will make you wish you had stayed dead!” he yelled as he charged along the wharf.

Spirits boiled up from the ocean, icy claws slashing towards him. Olaf’s axe sang out, cleaving a glittering arc through the host. The dead screeched as his blade sundered them, its True Ice edge more lethal than any enchantment.

They howled as they died a second time and Olaf sang the song he’d written for the moment of his death with lusty vigor. The words were simple, but the equal of any saga told by the wandering poets of the ice. How long had he waited to sing these words? How often had he feared he might never get the chance?

A shimmering mist of snapping jaws swarmed him, specters and things of mist. Webs of frost patterned his hauberk and the deathly touch of voracious spirits burned his skin.

But Olaf’s heart was mighty and it fired his blood to heights of fury unknown to all but the berserker. He shrugged off the pain of the wraith touch, feeling reason recede and fury build.

Crimson froth built at the corners of his mouth as he bit the inside of his cheeks raw. He roared and swung his axe like a madman, caring nothing for pain, only that he slew his enemies.

That they were dead already meant nothing to him.

Olaf drew his axe back, ready to strike another blow, when a deafening crash of splintering columns and roof beams erupted behind him. He spun to face this new foe as a blizzard of smashed wood and stone cascaded onto the quayside. Bladed shards sliced his face and fist-sized chunks of stone pummeled his arms raw. Rendered fats and animal fluids fell in a rank drizzle as a horrendous groaning issued from the black mist.

Then he saw it.

The spirit of the Krakenwyrm arose from the remains of the Slaughter Dock. Titanic and filled with fury, its ghostly tentacles lifted into the air and smashed down like thunderbolts hurled by a wrathful god. An entire street was smashed to ruin in the blink of an eye and Olaf’s berserker fury surged as he finally beheld a foe worthy of claiming his life.

Olaf raised his axe in salute of his killer.

“Ya beauty!” he yelled and charged to his doom.

The woman was beautiful, with wide, almond shaped eyes, full lips and the high cheekbones common to Demacia. The portrait in the locket was a miniature masterpiece, but it failed to capture the depth of Senna’s strength and determination.

He rarely looked at her picture, knowing that to carry his grief too close to his heart made him weak. Grief was a chink in his armor. Lucian could not allow himself to truly feel her loss, so he snapped the locket shut. He knew he should bury it in the sand of this cave beneath the cliffs, but could not put her memory below the earth as he had her body.

He would shut the grief away until Thresh was destroyed and Senna’s death avenged.

Then, and only then, would Lucian mourn his lost wife with tears and offerings to the Veiled Lady.

How long had it been since that terrible night?

He felt the bottomless abyss of sorrow lurking in ambush and viciously suppressed it as he had so many times before. He drew on the teachings of his order, repeating the mantras he and Senna had been taught to close themselves off from emotion. Only then could he reach a place of equilibrium that would allow him to face deathly horrors beyond imagining.

The grief ebbed slowly, but it remained.

He’d opened the locket only reluctantly, feeling a growing distance between himself and Senna’s memory. He found he could no longer recall the exact sweep of her jawline, the smoothness of her skin or the precise color of her eyes.

The longer his hunt went on, the further away she felt.

Lucian lifted his head, letting the breath ease from his lungs, forcing his heartbeat to slow.

The walls of the cave were pale limestone, gouged from the cliffs upon which Bilgewater was built. The motion of water and the stone picks of the natives had crafted a labyrinth beneath the city few knew of or even suspected existed. The pale rock walls were etched with looping spirals, rippling waves and things that might have been unblinking eyes.

He’d learned these were symbols of the native religion, but whoever had carved them had not visited this place in many years. He’d found it by following the secret symbols of his own order, symbols that would guide him to places of refuge and succor in any city of Valoran.

Only dim reflections of light shimmered on the roof of the cave, but as his eyes followed the spiral of carvings, a shimmering radiance spread from his palm.

Let me be your shield.

Lucian looked down, the memory of her words as clear as though she stood next to him.

The locket glistened with lambent green flame.

He looped the chain of the locket around his neck and swept up his twin relic pistols.

“Thresh,” he whispered.

Bilgewater’s streets were deserted. The bells from the ocean were still ringing and cries of terror echoed from below. Rat Town was completely covered by the Black Mist, and howling storms raged over Port Mourn’s desolation. Fires burned all along Butcher’s Bridge and a shimmering fog clung to the cliffs above the Grey Harbor.

The people in the upper reaches of the city hid in their homes and prayed to the Bearded Lady that the Harrowing would pass them by, that grief would fall upon some other poor unfortunate.

Warding candles of ambergris burned in every window, shimmering through bottle green sea-glass. Burning roots of Empress of the Dark Forest hung from doors, shutters and nailed up planks.

“People really believe in the Empress?” asked Miss Fortune.

Rafen shrugged, his mouth a thin line and the creases around his eyes pulled tight as he searched the gathering mist for threats. He pulled out a smoldering length of identical root from beneath his shirt.

“It’s all about where you place your faith, isn’t it?”

Miss Fortune drew her pistols.

“I have faith in these and in us,” she said. “What else are you carrying?”

“This cutlass has kept me safe through six Harrowings,” he said, tapping its pommel again. “I offered up a bottle of ten year old rum to the Bearded Lady and this knife here was sold to me by a man who swore its edge was purest sunsteel.”

Miss Fortune glanced at the scabbarded knife, certain without even seeing the blade that Rafen had been swindled. The workmanship around the quillons was too poor to be Demacian, but she wasn’t about to tell him that.

“What about you?” he asked.

Miss Fortune patted her pouch of pistol shot.

“Every one’s been dipped in Myron’s Dark,” she said, loud enough for every one of her thirty-strong company to hear. “If the dead want a fight, we’ll meet them with spirits of our own.”

The oppressive gloom made it hard to laugh, but she saw a few smiles and that was about as much as she could expect on a night like this.

She turned and pushed down into Bilgewater, descending crooked stairs cut into the rock of the cliffs, crossing secret bridges of half-rotted rope and threading forgotten alleys that hadn’t known the tread of feet in years.

She brought them out into a wide square on one of the floating wharf-shanties, where swaying dwellings leaned together as though their twisted eaves whispered to one another. Every façade was a mishmash of driftwood, and patterns of frost clung to the skewed timbers. Frozen winds blew through the patchwork dwellings, freighted with sobs and screams from afar. Flaming braziers hung from hundreds of mast-lines strung between buildings, smoking with strange herbs. Pools of water rippled with reflections of things that weren’t there.

Most days this was a thriving marketplace, packed to the gunwales with stalls, rattling meat-vendors, drink-hawkers, merchants, pirates, bounty hunters and surly flotsam washed in from every corner of the world. Just about everywhere in Bilgewater had a view of this place, which was just how Miss Fortune wanted it.

Mist clung to every outcropping of timber.

Discarded figureheads wept frozen tears.

Mist and shadows gathered.

“Cutpurse Square?” said Rafen. “How did we get here? I ran this place as a wharf-snipe. Thought I knew every way in and out like any good little thief.”

“Not every way,” said Miss Fortune.

The counting houses on either side were silent and dark, and she resisted the impulse to look through the torn sheets of flapping canvas nailed over porthole windows.

“How do you know these routes and I don’t?”

“Lady Bilgewater and I are two of a kind,” said Miss Fortune, her gaze narrowing as black mist seeped into the square. “She whispers her secrets to me like an old friend, so I know her every hidden wynd and jitty like you never will.”

Rafen grunted as they spread into the empty square.

“What next?”

“We wait,” said Miss Fortune as they reached the center of the square, feeling terribly exposed.

The black mist twitched with things moving in its depths.

A disembodied skull of ghostly light stretched from the darkness, empty-eyed and with sharpened teeth. Its jaw stretched wider than any natural bone structure would allow and a keening wail built in its gullet.

Miss Fortune’s bullets punched through each of its eye-sockets and the skull vanished with a shriek of frustration. She twisted the wheel-lock on each pistol and ingenious mechanisms within reloaded each one.

For a moment, all was silent.

Then the black mist erupted in a screeching howl as the spirits of the dead surged into the square.

For the second time this evening, Olaf cut his way inside the dead Krakenwyrm. He wielded his axe like a crazed woodsman, hewing left and right with gleeful abandon. The beast’s vast limbs were insubstantial as mist, yet the ice of his blade clove them like flesh.

Tentacles flailed and slammed down on the stone of the wharf, but Olaf was fast for a big man. Slow warriors didn’t survive in the Freljord. He rolled and slashed with his axe, severing a suckered length of limb that faded from existence as it was parted from the monster’s body.

Even in the grip of the red shroud, Olaf saw the creature’s skull in the thrashing chaos of phantom limbs surrounding him.

Its eyes were afire with the enraged spirit of its life.

A moment of sublime connection passed between them.

The beast’s soul knew him.

Olaf laughed with joy.

“You see the taker of your life and we are now bonded in death!” he roared. “Mayhap if you kill me, we shall battle forever in the realms beyond mortal ken.”

The prospect of eternal war against so mighty a foe poured fresh strength into Olaf’s aching muscles. He charged towards the creature’s maw, caring nothing for his pain as each brush with the Krakenwyrm’s tentacles burned his skin worse than the splinter-winds of the Lokfar coast.

He leapt into the air, axe aloft.

He looked glorious death in the face.

A tentacle whipped out and lashed around his thigh.

It swung him around in a dizzying arc, lifting him high into the air.

“Come then!” bellowed Olaf, punching his axe skyward in salute of their shared destiny. “Unto death!”

A wraith-creature with grasping talons and a mouth of icy fangs lunged from the swirling mass of spirits. Miss Fortune put a bullet through its face and it vanished like smoke in a gale.

A second shot and another spirit vanished.

She grinned through her fear as she spun into cover behind a weather-worn stone bollard of the River King to reload. On impulse, she leaned over and gave his toothy grin a kiss.

It’s all about where you place your faith.

Gods, bullets or her own skill?

The grin fell from her face as one of the pistols jammed with a grinding crunch of metal. Her mother’s admonishing words arose from the dark recesses of memory.

“That’s what you get when someone else mixes your powder, Sarah,” she said, holstering the gun and sliding her sword from its sheath. She’d looted it from the captain of a Demacian galiot running north up the Shuriman rust-coast, and it was as fine an example of the artificer’s art as any she’d seen.

Miss Fortune spun from cover, firing her loaded pistol and slashing her sword through the mist creatures. Her shot plucked another specter from the air and her sword’s edge bit as if cutting flesh and bone. Did the spirits of the dead have a physical component to them that could be hurt? It seemed unlikely, but she was wounding something inside them.

She didn’t have time to think too hard on the matter and suspected that whatever power she’d tapped into would be undone if she did.

Men and women screamed as the howling storm of dead spirits filled Cutpurse Square, slashing with claws that froze their blood or reached into chests and sundered hearts with terror. Seven were dead, maybe more, their souls wrenched from their fallen corpses to turn on their comrades. Her heroic band fought with blades and muskets, shouting the name of the Bearded Lady, their loved ones, and even heathen gods of faraway lands.

Whatever works, thought Miss Fortune.

Rafen was down on one knee, his face ashen, breathing like a wharfside doxy after a long shift. Scraps of mist clung to him like cobwebs and the smoldering root around his neck burned with a fierce cherry red glow.

“On your feet, this fight isn’t done!” she said.

“Don’t tell me the fight’s not done,” he snapped, pushing himself to his feet. “I’ve been through more Harrowings than you could wrap a dead rat’s tail around.”

Before Miss Fortune could ask exactly what that meant, he leaned to the side and fired his pistol at something behind her. A conjoined spirit of wolf and bat screeched as it was banished, and Miss Fortune returned the favor as a spirit form of grasping hooks and snapping fangs lunged at her second in command.

“Everyone down!” shouted Miss Fortune, plucking a pair of splinter bombs from her belt and lobbing them into the howling mist.

They detonated in a deafening explosion of fire and smoke. Wood splinters and fragments of stone ricocheted. Broken glass fell in a glittering rain of daggers. Acrid fog filled the square, but it was man-made and entirely bereft of spirits.

Rafen shook his head and worked a finger in his ear.

“What was in that bomb?”

“Black Powder mixed with essence of copal and rue,” said Miss Fortune. “One from my special stash.”

“And stuff like that works against the dead?”

“My mother believed in it,” she said.

“Good enough for me,” said Rafen. “You know, we might just make it through-”

“Don’t say it,” warned Miss Fortune.

The mist began coalescing throughout the square, first in thin tendrils and wisps, then in glowing outlines of monsters; things with conjoined legs, fang-filled jaws, and arms that ended in hooks or pincers. The spirits they thought they’d killed.

Reforming, returning.

What was it folk said about plans and the contents of a privy?

“Turns out the dead are pretty hard to kill,” said Miss Fortune, trying not to let her fear show.

She’d been naïve to think petty trinkets and blind faith were enough to face the spirits of the dead. She’d wanted to show the people of Bilgewater they didn’t need Gangplank, that they could forge their own destiny.

Instead, she was going to get herself killed and leave the city to be torn apart.

A bass rumble rolled through the square. Then another.

Percussive thunder strikes, rising in a stalking storm.

It grew to become pounding hammerblows upon an anvil. Faster and louder until the ground shook with its violence.

“What in the nine deeps is that?” said Rafen.

“I don’t know,” said Miss Fortune as the outline of a spectral horseman in midnight plate emerged from the mist. He sat atop a strangely proportioned warhorse and his helm was worked in the form of a snarling demon.

“A dread knight,” said Miss Fortune.

Rafen shook his head, his face drained of color.

“That’s no knight,” he said. “That’s the Shadow of War…”

Paralyzing terror rippled through Miss Fortune’s company at the mention of this eternal nightmare of killing rage and endless fury.

The Shadow of War.

His name was once Hecarim, but no one knew if that were true or some ancient taleteller’s invention. Only fools dared recite his dark legend around the hearthfire, and even then only after enough rum to sink a Noxian war-barque.

As the Shadow of War emerged further from the mist, Miss Fortune saw he was no mere horseman. Cold dread settled upon her like a shroud at the sight of the monstrous creature.

Perhaps Hecarim had once been a knight, man and horse separate entities. But rider and mount were now one, a single, towering behemoth whose only purpose was destruction.

“They’re all around us,” said a voice.

Miss Fortune risked looking away from the armored centaur to see a whole host of ghostly knights, their outlines lambent with pellucid green radiance. They leveled lances or drew swords of dark radiance. Hecarim swept out a hooked and terrible glaive, its killing edge erupting with green fire.

“You know any secret ways out of here?” asked Rafen.

“No,” said Miss Fortune. “I want to fight that bastard.”

“You want to fight the Shadow of War?”

Before Miss Fortune could answer, a hooded figure leapt from the rooftop of a grain store and dropped into the square. He landed gracefully, a storm coat of worn leather splayed behind him. He carried two pistols, but they were like no weapons Miss Fortune had ever seen on her mother’s gun-table; bronzed metalwork braced around hunks of what looked like carved stone.

Light filled the square as he loosed searing bolts from each pistol in a fusillade that put the destruction of the Dead Pool to shame. The man turned in a tight spiral, marking targets and picking them off with whip-fast motion. The mist burned where his bolts struck, and the ghostly wraiths screeched as they were consumed.

The mist withdrew from Cutpurse Square, taking Hecarim and the death knights with it. Something told Miss Fortune this was but a temporary respite.

The man holstered his pistols and turned to look at Miss Fortune, throwing back his hood to reveal darkly handsome features with haunted eyes.

“The thing about shadows,” he said. “Bring enough light and they disappear.”

Olaf was not happy with this doom.

He hoped men would speak of his epic battle with the Krakenwyrm, not this ignoble fall to his death.

He hoped someone might have seen him charge the sea beast.

He prayed at least one observer had seen him lifted high into the air by its ghostly tentacle, then fled before seeing him hurled away like an unworthy morsel.

Olaf crashed down through the roof of a building bolted to the side of the cliff. Maybe it was a ship’s hull? He fell too fast to make it out. Crashing timbers and earthenware tumbled with him in his headlong plunge through the building. He glimpsed astonished, shouting faces flash past him.

Olaf smashed through a floor. A support beam drove the wind from him as he tumbled down Bilgewater’s cliffs. He bounced from an outcrop of rock and went headfirst through an open window, crashing out again through yet another floor.

Angry curses followed him down.

He spun out into a trailing forest of ropes and pulleys, flags and pennants. He thrashed as he fell, tangling his limbs and weapon. Fate was mocking him, wrapping him in a folded shroud of canvas sailcloth.

“Not like this, damn it!” he roared. “Not like this!”

“Who are you and where can I get a pair of guns like those?” said Miss Fortune, offering her hand to the new arrival.

“My name is Lucian,” he said, warily taking her hand.

“Damn glad to know you, friend,” said Rafen, clapping him on the back as if they were old shipmates. Miss Fortune saw Rafen’s familiarity made Lucian acutely uncomfortable, like he’d forgotten how to be around others.

His eyes scanned the edges of the square, his fingers dancing on the grips of his pistols.

“You’re a welcome sight, Lucian,” said Miss Fortune.

“We should move.” he said. “The Shadow of War will return.”

“He’s right,” said Rafen, giving her an imploring look. “It’s time to get inside, batten down the hatches.”

“No. We came out to fight.”

“Look, I get it, Sarah. We won Bilgewater and you need to fight to hold onto it, to show everyone you’re better than Gangplank. Well, you’ve done that. We went out into the Black Mist and we fought the dead. That’s more than he ever did. Anyone who risks lookin’ out a window is gonna know that. Hell, even the ones who ain’t looking will hear about it. What more do you want?”

“To fight for Bilgewater.”

“There’s fighting for Bilgewater and then there’s dying for Bilgewater,” said Rafen. “I’m all up for the first, not so much the second. These men and women followed you down into hell, but now it’s time to climb back out.”

Miss Fortune faced her company of fighters, every ragged, cutthroat one of them. None of them could be trusted not to sell their own mothers for a shiny trinket, but they’d done everything and more she’d asked of them. Venturing out into the Black Mist was just about the bravest thing any of them had ever done and she couldn’t repay that by leading them to their deaths for the sake of her vengeance.

“You’re right,” she said, taking a breath. “We’re done here.”

“Then may fortune follow you,” said Lucian, turning away and drawing his strange pistols once again.

“Wait,” said Miss Fortune. “Come with us.”

Lucian shook his head. “No, there is a mist wraith I need to destroy. The one they call Thresh, the Chain Warden. I owe him a death.”

Miss Fortune saw the lines around Lucian’s eyes deepen and recognized the expression she’d worn ever since her mother’s murder.

“He took someone from you, didn’t he?” she said.

Lucian nodded slowly, and said no more, but his very silence spoke volumes.

“This clearly isn’t your first tussle with the dead,” she said, “but you won’t survive the night if you stay out here alone. I’m guessing that might not mean much to you, but whoever this Thresh took from you, they wouldn’t want you to die here.”

Lucian’s eyes flicked downwards, and Miss Fortune saw a silver locket just visible round his neck. Was it her imagination or a trick of the mist that made it shimmer in the moonlight?

“Come with us,” said Miss Fortune. “Find somewhere safe till morning and you’ll live to do it again.”

“Safe? Where is safe in this city?” said Lucian.

“I think I might know a place,” said Miss Fortune.

They left Cutpurse Square and were traveling west up towards the Serpent Bridge when they found the Freljordian. He hung from a crooked spar like a shrouded corpse on a gibbet. Unlike most corpses, however, this one was thrashing like a landed fish.

A splintered pile of debris lay scattered all around him, and Miss Fortune looked up to see how far he’d fallen through the cliffside dwellings.

A long way was the answer, and that he was still alive was nothing short of a miracle.

Lucian leveled his pistols, but she shook her head.

“No, this one’s actually on the right side of the grave.”

Muffled cries came from within the shroud, curses that would get a man beaten to death in a host of different lands, shouted in a thick, Freljordian accent.

She placed the tip of her sword against the canvas and sliced downwards. Like a newborn sea-calf pulled from a ruptured birth-sac, a hugely bearded man spilled onto the cobbles. The reek of fish guts and offal clung to him.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet, brandishing an axe with a blade like a shard of diamond ice.

“Which way to the Slaughter Docks?” he said, weaving like a drunk. He looked around, confused, his head a mass of lumps and bruises.

“Ordinarily I’d tell you to follow your nose,” said Miss Fortune, “but I’d be amazed if you’ve any sense of smell left.”

“I’ll kill that Krakenwyrm ten times over if I have to,” said the man. “I owe it a death.”

“Lot of that going around tonight,” said Miss Fortune.

The Freljordian named himself Olaf, a warrior of the rightful mistress of the ice, and, after shaking off his concussion, declared his intention to join them until he could fight the most dangerous spirit within the Black Mist.

“Do you want to die?” Lucian asked him.

“Of course,” said Olaf, as though the very question was the height of foolishness. “I seek an ending worthy of legend.”

Miss Fortune left the madman to his dreams of death. So long as he swung that axe in the right direction, he was welcome to join them as they pushed onwards.

Three times the mist closed in on them, and each time it took an unlucky soul from their company. Spiteful laughter echoed from the sides of buildings, the sound of a whetstone over rusted steel. Ranks of carrion birds cawed from rooftops in anticipation of a flesh banquet by the light of the moon. Welcoming lights danced in the darkness of the mist, like beguiling corpse-candles over sucking marshland.

“Don’t look at them,” warned Lucian.

His warning came too late for one man and his wife. Miss Fortune didn’t know their names, but knew they had lost a son to ocean-ague less than a year ago. They walked from the cliffs following a vision in the lights only they could see.

Another man took his hooked hand to his throat before his friends could stop him. Another simply vanished into the mist without anyone seeing him go.

By the time they reached Serpent Bridge, their company numbered less than a dozen. Miss Fortune couldn’t feel sorry for them, she’d told them not to come with her. If they’d wanted to live forever, they should be shuttered behind closed doors and protective carvings, clutching spiral talismans of the Bearded Lady and praying to whatever gave them solace.

But against the Harrowing, even that was no guarantee of safety.

They’d passed countless homes smashed open with splintered shutters and doors hanging limply from leather hinges. Miss Fortune kept her eyes fixed forward, but it was impossible not to feel the accusing gazes from the frozen faces within or sense the terror of their last moments.

“The Black Mist will have its due,” said Rafen as they passed yet another charnel house, the families within cold and dead.

She wanted to be angry at such acceptance of horror, but what good would that do? After all, he was right.

Instead, she focused on the hazed outline of the structure across the bridge. It sat in the center of a gouged crater in the cliff, as if some mighty sea creature had taken a vast bite from the rock. Like most places in Bilgewater it was constructed from the ocean’s leavings. Its walls were driftwood and branches from faraway lands, its windows the scavenged remains of ships swept up from the seabed. It had a peculiar quality of possessing not a single straight line anywhere in its construction. The curious angles gave it a sense of being somehow in motion, as if it might one day choose another place to set down temporary roots.

Its spire was likewise crooked, fluted like the horn of a narwhal and topped with the same spiral symbol Miss Fortune wore around her neck. A shimmering light wreathed the icon, and where it shone the darkness was held in abeyance.

“What is that place?” asked Lucian.

“The Temple of the Bearded Lady,” she said. “The House of Nagakabouros.”

“Is it safe?”

“It’s better than staying out here.”

Lucian nodded and they set off across the winding length of the bridge. Like the temple it approached, the bridge was an uneven thing, its cobbles undulant like something alive.

Rafen paused at the crumbling parapet and looked down.

“Getting higher every year,” he said.

Reluctantly, Miss Fortune joined him and looked over the edge.

The docks and Rat Town were smothered beneath the Black Mist, and even the web of gun’dolas was barely visible. Bilgewater was choking in the grip of the mist, its tendrils seeping ever deeper into the city. Screams of terror drifted upwards, each one a life ended and a fresh soul for the legion of the dead.

Rafen shrugged. “A few years from now there won’t be anywhere in Bilgewater beyond its reach.”

“A lot can happen in a few years,” said Miss Fortune.

“This happens every year?” asked Olaf, one foot perched on the parapet with a reckless disregard for the dizzying drop.

Miss Fortune nodded.

“Excellent,” said the Freljordian. “If I am fated not to die this night, I will return here when the Black Mist rises again.”

“It’s your funeral,” replied Rafen.

“Thank you,” said Olaf, slapping an enormous palm on Rafen’s back, almost knocking him from the bridge. The Freljordian’s eyes widened as a host of ghostly tentacles rose from the mist, uncoiling to smash down on the dwellings of Rat Town.

“The beast!” he cried.

And before anyone could stop him, he vaulted onto the parapet and hurled himself from the edge.

“Mad bastard,” said Rafen as Olaf’s dwindling form vanished into the mist below.

“All the ice-dwellers are mad,” said Miss Fortune. “But he was madder than most I’ve met.”

“Get everyone inside,” said Lucian.

She heard the urgency in his voice and turned to see him facing a towering figure in stitched black robes hung with hooked chains. Sickly green light wreathed the specter as it lifted a swaying lantern in one pallid hand. Fear touched Miss Fortune, fear like nothing she’d known since she’d watched her mother die and stared down the barrel of the killer’s gun.

Lucian drew his pistols. “Thresh is mine.”

“He’s all yours,” she said, and turned away.

Her gaze was drawn upwards as shadows closed around the temple. The breath caught in her throat as she saw Hecarim and his death knights at the crater’s ridge.

The Shadow of War raised his fiery glaive and the ghostly horsemen urged their hell-steeds downward. No mortal rider could make that descent, but these were riders of death.

“Run!” shouted Miss Fortune.

The end of the bridge thickened with noxious green light. The Chain Warden hid his corpse features beneath a rotted hood, but the light of his lantern hinted at the remains of ravaged flesh, gaunt and drained of all emotion, save sadistic relish.

He moved softly, like all his kind. Pained moans sighed from his robes as he moved. Thresh lifted his head a fraction, and Lucian saw the glint of too-sharp teeth widen in a grin of anticipation.

“Mortal,” said Thresh, rolling the word around his mouth like a sweetmeat.

Lucian knelt, reciting the mantra of clarity to steel his soul for the battle to come. He had prepared for this moment a thousand times, and now that it was here, his mouth was dry, his palms slick with sweat.

“You murdered Senna,” he said, standing and lifting his head. “The only person I had left in the world.”

“Senna...?” said Thresh, the sound wet and gurgling, as though squeezed from a throat once crushed by a hangman’s noose.

“My wife,” said Lucian, knowing he should not speak, that every word was a weapon the wraith would turn against him. Tears blurred his vision as grief washed away every preparation and every shred of logic. He lifted the silver locket from around his neck and snapped it open, needing the wraith to understand the depth of all he had lost.

Thresh grinned, his needle teeth glinting as he tapped the glass of the lantern with a yellowed nail.

“I remember her,” he said. “A vital soul. Not yet barren and cold. Ripe for torment. Hope for a new life. It bloomed in her, you know. Fresh, new, like a spring flower. All too easy to pluck and ruin those with dreams.”

Lucian lifted his pistols.

“If you remember her, then you will remember these,” he said.

The toothed grin never faltered beneath the ragged cowl.

“The weapons of light,” he said.

“And light is ever the bane of darkness,” said Lucian, channeling every scrap of hatred into his relic pistols.

“Wait,” said Thresh, but Lucian was done waiting.

He loosed a pair of blinding shots.

A conflagration of purifying fire engulfed the Chain Warden and his howls were music to Lucian’s ears.

Then the howls changed to gurgling laughter.

A nimbus of dark light faded around Thresh, drawn back into his lantern and leaving him utterly untouched by the fire.

Lucian fired again, a storm of radiant bolts, each perfectly aimed, but every one wasted. Each shot dissipated harmlessly against a shimmering haze of dark energy from the lantern.

“Yes, I remember those weapons,” said the wraith. “I tore their secrets from her mind.”

Lucian froze.

“What did you just say?”

Thresh laughed, a wheezing, consumptive rasp.

“You don’t know? After all the reborn order learned of me, you never once suspected?”

Lucian felt cold dread settle in his belly. A horror he had never acknowledged for fear he would go insane.

“She did not die,” continued Thresh, holding up his lantern.

Lucian saw tortured spirits twisting in its depths.

Thresh grinned. “I ripped her soul out and kept it.”

“No...” said Lucian. “I saw her die.”

“She screams still inside my lantern,” said Thresh, drifting closer with every choked-out word. “Her every moment of existence is sweet agony. Listen...can you hear her?”

“No,” sobbed Lucian, his relic pistols falling to the stones of the bridge.

Thresh circled him, chains snaking from his leather belt and slithering over Lucian’s body. The hooks cut into his storm coat, seeking the soft flesh beneath.

“Hope was her weakness. Love her undoing.”

Lucian looked up into Thresh’s ravaged features.

His eyes were voids, dark holes into emptiness.

Whatever Thresh had been in life, nothing now remained. No compassion, no mercy and no humanity.

“All is death and suffering, mortal,” said the Chain Warden, reaching for Lucian’s neck. “No matter where you run, your only true legacy is death. But before then, there is me.”

The breath hammered in Miss Fortune’s throat as she ran for the temple. Her lungs fought to draw breath, and her veins felt sluggish with ice. Coils of enervating mist reached up to the rock of the temple, drawn by the presence of the two lords of the unliving. Brilliant flashes of light flared behind her, but she didn’t look back. She heard the thunder of hoof beats on rock, seeing sparks above them in the darkness.

She imagined the breath of ghostly steeds on her neck.

The space between her shoulder blades burned hot where she expected the stabbing thrust of a spectral lance.

Wait, how can they make sparks when they’re ghosts?

The absurdity of the thought made her laugh, and she was still laughing as she slammed into the warped timber doors of the temple. Rafen and her ragged band were already there, hammering fists and palms against the door.

“In the name of the Bearded Lady, let us in!” he yelled.

He looked up as Miss Fortune joined him.

“The doors are shut,” he said.

“I noticed,” she gasped, wrenching the pendant Illaoi had given her. She placed her palm flat on door, with the coral pressed hard against the wood.

“Illaoi!” she shouted. “I’m ready to stamp on that damn eel’s neck. Now open the bloody door!”

“Eel?” said Rafen. “What eel? What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” she snapped, battering her palm bloody against the wood. “I think it was a metaphor.”

The door swung outwards as if it had been unbarred the whole time. Miss Fortune stepped back to allow her fighters inside first, and finally turned around.

Hecarim reared up and swung his fiery glaive for her skull.

A hand grasped her collar and hauled her backward. The tip of the weapon sliced an inch from her throat.

She fell hard on her backside.

Illaoi stood in the doorway, holding her stone idol out before her like a shield. White mist clung to it like corposant.

“The dead are not welcome here,” she said.

Rafen and the others hauled the door shut and dropped a heavy spar of seasoned oak into place on the rusted anchors to either side. A huge impact slammed into the door.

Wood split and splinters flew.

Illaoi turned and walked past Miss Fortune, still sprawled on a mosaic floor of seashells and clay fragments.

“You took your sweet time, girl,” she said as Miss Fortune climbed to her feet. The temple was filled with at least two hundred people, maybe more. She saw a wide cross section of Bilgewater’s denizens: its native population, pirates, traders and assorted sea-scum, together with travellers unlucky or unwise enough to seek a berth so close to the Harrowing.

“Is that door going to hold?” she asked.

“It will or it won’t,” said Illaoi, heading towards a many-tentacled statue at the centre of the temple. Miss Fortune tried to make sense of it, but gave up when her eye kept getting lost in the many spirals and looping curves.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have,” said Illaoi, setting her idol in a concave depression in the statue. She began moving in a circle around the statue, beating a rhythmic pattern on her thighs and chest with her fists. The people in the temple joined her circling, beating palms against bare skin, stamping their feet and speaking in a language she didn’t understand.

“What are they doing?”

“Giving some motion back to the world,” said Illaoi. “But we will need time.”

“You’ll have it,” promised Miss Fortune.

Lucian felt the spectral hooks bite deep into his flesh, colder than northern ice and twice as painful. The Chain Warden’s hand closed on his throat and his skin burned at the wraith’s touch. He felt his strength drawn from him, the beat of his heart slow.

Thresh lifted him from the ground and held his lantern aloft, ready to receive his soul. The moaning lights within swirled in agitation, ghostly faces and hands pressing against the glass from within.

“Long I have sought your soul, shadow hunter,” said Thresh. “But only now is it ripe for the taking.”

Lucian’s vision greyed at the edges, feeling his soul peel away from his bones. He fought to hold on, but the Chain Warden had been harvesting souls for countless lifetimes and knew his craft better than any.

“Struggle harder,” said Thresh with monstrous appetite. “Your soul burns brighter when you fight.”

Lucian tried to speak, but no words came out, just a soft stream of warm breath that carried his soul.

A glittering scythe floated in the air above Lucian, a murder-soaked reaper of souls. Its blade shivered with anticipation.

Lucian...

That voice. Her voice.

My love...

The murder-edge of Thresh’s blade turned, angled to better part soul from flesh.

Lucian drew back his breath as he saw a face resolve in the glass of the lantern. One among countless thousands, but one with more reason than any to push herself to the fore.

Full lips, wide, almond shaped eyes, imploring him to live.

“Senna...” gasped Lucian.

Let me be your shield.

He knew what she meant in a heartbeat.

The link between them was as strong as it had been when they hunted the creatures of shadow side by side.

With the last of his strength, Lucian reached up and snapped the locket from around his neck. The chain glittered silver in the moonlight.

The Chain Warden saw something was amiss and hissed in anger.

Lucian was faster.

He spun the chain like a slingshot, but instead of loosing a lead bullet, he lashed it around the arm holding the lantern. Before Thresh could shake it off, Lucian drew the silver awl from its sheath in his long coat and plunged it into the specter’s wrist.

The Chain Warden screeched in pain, a sensation he had likely not felt in millennia. He dropped Lucian and thrashed in agony as the myriad souls trapped in his lantern suddenly found a means to strike back at their tormentor.

Lucian felt his soul snap back into his body and drew in heaving gulps of air, like a drowning man breaking the surface.

Hurry, my love. He is too strong...

His sight returned, clearer than ever before. Lucian snatched his pistols from the ground. He caught the briefest glimpse of Senna’s face in the lantern and etched it on his heart.

Never again would her face grow dim in his memories.

“Thresh,” he said, aiming his twin pistols.

The Chain Warden looked up, the voids of his eyes alight with outrage at the defiance of his captive souls. He held Lucian’s gaze and extended his lantern, but the rebellious souls had dispelled whatever protection it once offered.

Lucian fired a blistering series of perfect shots.

They burned through the Chain Warden’s ghostly robes and ignited his spirit form in a searing inferno of light. Lucian marched towards Thresh, his twin weapons blazing.

Shrieking in agony, the Chain Warden retreated from Lucian’s unending barrage, his wraithform now powerless to resist these weapons of ancient power.

“Death is here for you,” said Lucian. “Embrace it, safe in the knowledge I will ensure it is final.”

Thresh gave one last howl before leaping from the bridge, falling like a burning comet to the city below.

Lucian watched him fall until the Black Mist swallowed him.

He slumped to his knees.

“Thank you, my love,” said Lucian. “My light.”

The temple walls shook with the violence of the assault. Black mist oozed between ill-fitting planks and through cracks in the scavenged glass of the windows. The door shuddered in its frame. Grasping claws of mist tore at the wood. Screams echoed as a howling gale battered the mismatched timbers of the roof.

“Over there!” shouted Miss Fortune as a host of mist-creatures with burning red eyes poured through a broken section of wall that had once been a series of tea-chests from Ionia.

She leapt into the midst of the wraiths. It felt like jumping naked into an ice hole cut in a glacier. Even the lightest touch of the dead leeched warmth and life.

The coral pendant burned hot against her skin.

She slashed her looted sword through the creatures and felt the same bite she’d felt before. Her bullets might be useless against the dead, but this Demacian blade hurt them. They fell back from her, screeching and hissing.

Could the dead know fear?

It seemed they could, for they fled the sword’s glittering edge. She didn’t let them go, stabbing and slashing the mist wherever it poured in.

“That’s it! Run!” she yelled.

A child screamed and Miss Fortune sprinted over as the mist reached to claim him. She dived and snatched the boy in her arms before rolling to safety. Chill claws plunged into her back, and Miss Fortune gasped as numbing cold spread through her limbs.

She stabbed behind her and something dead howled.

A woman sheltering behind an overturned pew reached for the boy and Miss Fortune let him squirm to safety. She pushed herself to her feet, weakness spreading through her body like a raging infection.

Everywhere was gunfire and clashing steel, deathly howls and screams of terror.

“Sarah!” shouted Rafen.

She looked up to see the oaken locking bar securing the door split along its length. Rafen and a dozen men had their backs braced against the bludgeoning assault, but the doors were bulging inwards. Cracks spread and grasping hands of mist reached inside. A man was snatched backwards and his piteous screams were abruptly cut off as he vanished into the mist.

Another had his arm ripped off as he reached to help him.

Rafen spun and rammed his dagger through the gap.

Clawed hands tore the useless weapon from his hand.

A howling body pushed itself in through the disintegrating door and plunged its hands into Rafen’s chest. Her second in command roared in pain, his face draining of color.

She staggered over to him, her strength all but gone. Her blade hacked through spectral arms, and the creature shrieked as it vanished. Rafen fell into her, and they collapsed back into the nave together.

Rafen gasped for breath, his features as slack as hers.

“Don’t you die on me, Rafen!” she wheezed.

“It’ll take more than the dead to kill me,” he grunted. “Bastard thing just winded me.”

Glass broke somewhere up above. Coils of black mist coalesced overhead, a boiling mass of snapping teeth, claws and hungry eyes.

Miss Fortune tried to get to her feet, but her limbs burned with exhaustion. She ground her teeth in frustration. Barely a handful of her company remained, and the people sheltering in here weren’t fighters.

The dead were getting in.

Miss Fortune looked back at Illaoi.

The priestess was surrounded by her people, all of them still circling the statue and performing their fist-thumping, palm-slapping ritual. It didn’t appear to be achieving anything. The strange statue remained unmoving and impotent.

What had she expected, that it would come to life and drive the dead back like some clanking iron golem from Piltover?

“Whatever it is you’re doing, do it faster!” shouted Miss Fortune.

A section of the roof ripped loose and spun off into the tempest surrounding the temple. A swirling column of spirits boiled inside and touched down like a tornado. Wraiths and things that defied understanding spun from the unliving vortex to fall upon the living.

Finally the door gave out and exploded inwards, the timbers dry and rotted by the touch of the dead. The skirling blast of a hunting horn filled the temple, and Miss Fortune’s hands flew to her ears at its deafening echoes.

Hecarim rode into the temple, crushing the men who’d been bracing the door with their bodies. Their souls were drawn up into the Shadow of War’s flaming glaive, and the cold fire of its edge illuminated the temple with loathsome radiance. His death knights rode at his back, and the spirits already within the temple drew back in recognition of Hecarim’s terrible glory.

“I said the dead are not welcome here,” boomed Illaoi.

Miss Fortune looked up to see the priestess towering over her, stout and majestic. Pale light clung to her limbs and sparkled on the stone tablet she held in trembling hands. Veins stood out like hawsers on her neck, and her jawline was taut with effort. Sweat ran in runnels down her face.

Whatever Illaoi was doing was costing her greatly.

“These mortal souls are mine,” said Hecarim, and Miss Fortune felt herself recoil from the iron syllables of his voice.

“They are not,” said Illaoi. “This is the house of Nagakabouros, who stands in opposition to the dead.”

“The dead will have their due,” said Hecarim, lowering his glaive to point at Illaoi’s heart.

The priestess shook her head.

“Not today,” she said. “Not while I still move.”

“You cannot stop me.”

“Deaf as well as dead,” grinned Illaoi as a swelling radiance built behind her. “I didn’t say I was going to stop you.”

Miss Fortune turned and saw the spiraling statue bathed in blinding radiance. White light smoked from its surfaces, and shadows fled from its touch. She shielded her eyes as the light billowed outwards like writhing tentacles and where it met the Black Mist it stripped it bare, exposing the twisted souls within. The sinuous light pulled the dead onwards, purging the baleful magic that cursed them to undeath so very long ago.

She expected screams, but instead the unbound dead wept with joy as their souls were freed to move on. The light spread over the cracked walls of the temple, and as it touched her, Miss Fortune cried out as the deathly numbness in her flesh was banished in a rush of heat and life.

The light of Nagakabouros closed on Hecarim, and Miss Fortune saw his fear at the thought of what transformations it might work upon him.

What could be so awful that it was better to remain cursed?

“You can be free, Hecarim,” said Illaoi, her voice strained to the limits of endurance by what she had unleashed. “You can move on, live in the light as the man you always dreamed of being before his grief and folly remade you.”

Hecarim roared and swept his glaive at Illaoi’s neck.

Miss Fortune’s blade intercepted it in a clashing flare of sparks. She shook her head.

“Get out of my city,” she said.

Hecarim’s blade drew back for another strike, but before the blow could land, the light finally pierced his veil of darkness. He bellowed in pain and fell back from its burning touch. The dark rider’s outline shimmered, like two picture box images wavering in candlelight on the same backcloth.

Miss Fortune caught a fleeting glimpse of a tall rider, armored in silver and gold. A young man, handsome and proud with dark eyes and a future of glory ahead of him.

What happened to him?

Hecarim roared and galloped from the temple.

His death knights and the darkness went with him, a shrieking host of tattered spirits following in their wake.

The light of Nagakabouros spread over Bilgewater like the coming dawn. None who saw it could ever remember so sweet a sight; the first rays of sunlight after a storm, the first hint of warmth after a bitter winter.

The Black Mist withdrew before it, roiling in a churning maelstrom of panicked spirits. The dead turned on one another in a frenzy, some fighting to return from whence they had come as others actively sought out the light’s release.

Silence fell as the Black Mist drew back over the ocean, drawn to the cursed island where it claimed dominion.

True dawn broke over the eastern horizon, and a cleansing wind blew through the city as the people of Bilgewater let out a collective breath.

The Harrowing was over.

Silence filled the temple; the utter lack of sound a stark contrast to the mayhem of moments ago.

“It’s done,” said Miss Fortune.

“Until the next time,” said Illaoi wearily. “The Black Mist’s hunger burns like a sickness.”

“What did you do?”

“What I had to.”

“Whatever it was, I thank you.”

Illaoi shook her head and put a powerful arm around Miss Fortune’s shoulder.

“Thank the goddess,” said Illaoi. “Make an offering. Something big.”

“I will,” said Miss Fortune.

“You better. My god dislikes empty promises.”

The veiled threat rankled, and for a moment she thought of putting a bullet through the priestess’ skull. Before she could do more than inch her hand to her pistols, Illaoi crumpled like a ripped topsail. Miss Fortune grabbed for her, but the priestess was too enormous to hold upright alone.

They went to the seashell floor together.

“Rafen, help me get her up,” she said.

Together they propped Illaoi up against a broken pew, grunting with the effort of shifting her colossal bulk.

“The Bearded Lady rose from the sea...” said Rafen.

“Don’t be stupid all your life,” said Illaoi. “I said Nagakabouros doesn’t live under the sea.”

“So where does she live?” asked Rafen. “In the sky?”

Illaoi shook her head and punched him in the heart. Rafen grunted and winced in pain.

“There is where you find her.”

Illaoi grinned at the obliqueness of her answer and her eyes drifted closed.

“Is she dead?” asked Rafen, rubbing his bruised chest.

Illaoi reached up and slapped him.

Then started snoring like a stevedore with lung-blight.

Lucian sat on the edge of the bridge and watched the city emerge from Black Mist. He’d hated Bilgewater on first sight, but there was a quality of beauty to it as the sunlight bathed its myriad clay-tiled roofs in a warm amber glow.

A city reborn, like it was every time the Harrowing receded.

An apt name for this dread moment, but one that carried only a fraction of the sorrow of its origins. Did anyone here really understand the real tragedy of the Shadow Isles?

And even if they did, would they care?

He turned as he heard footsteps approaching.

“It’s kind of pretty from up here,” said Miss Fortune.

“But only from up here.”

“Yes, it’s a viper’s nest alright,” said Miss Fortune. “There’s good people and bad people, but I’ve been making sure there’s a lot less of the bad.”

“The way I hear it, you started a war,” said Lucian. “Some might say that’s like burning down your house to kill a rat.”

He saw anger touch her, but it passed quickly.

“I thought I was making things better for everyone,” she said, straddling the parapet, “but they’re only getting worse. I need to do something about that, starting now.”

“Is that why you were out in the Black Mist?”

The woman thought for a moment.

“Maybe not at first,” she said. “I let a razor-eel off the hook when I killed Gangplank, and if I don’t take hold of it and get it back on, it’s going to bite a lot of the good people.”

“A razor-eel?”

“What I mean to say is that when I brought the Pirate King down, I had no idea what would happen when he was gone. I didn’t much care,” she said. “But I’ve seen what’s happening down there without someone in control. The city’s tearing its own throat out. Bilgewater needs someone strong at the top. No reason that someone can’t be me. The war’s just starting, and the only way it’ll end quickly is if I win it.”

The silence between them stretched.

“My answer is no.”

“I didn’t ask anything.”

“You’re going to,” said Lucian. “You want me to stay and help you win your war, but I can’t. Your fight isn’t my fight.”

“It could be,” said Miss Fortune. “The pay’s good and you’d get to kill a lot of bad people. And save a lot of innocent souls.”

“There is only one soul I need to save,” said Lucian. “And I won’t save it in Bilgewater.”

Miss Fortune nodded and held out her hand.

“Then I’ll say farewell and good hunting,” she said, standing and dusting her britches. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. Just know that you can lose yourself to revenge.”

Lucian watched her limp back to the sagging ruins of the temple as the survivors within emerged, blinking, into the daylight. She thought she understood what drove him, but she hadn’t the first clue.

Vengeance? He was far beyond vengeance.

His beloved was held in torment by an undying wraith, a creature from ancient days that understood suffering like no other.

Miss Fortune did not understand even a fraction of his pain.

He rose and lifted his gaze out to sea.

The ocean was calm now, an emerald green expanse.

People were already moving down on the docks, repairing ships and rebuilding their homes. Bilgewater never stopped, even in the aftermath of the Harrowing. He scanned the forest of swaying masts, looking for a ship that wasn’t too badly damaged. Perhaps one desperate captain could be persuaded to take him where he needed to go.

“I am coming, my light,” he said. “And I will free you.”

The fisherman grunted as he worked the stern-windlass to haul the big man from the water and onto his boat. The rope was frayed and he sweated in the cold air as he worked the crank.

“By the bristles of her bearded chin, you’re a big bastard, right sure ye are,” he said, snagging the big man’s armor with a gaffing hook and pulling him around over the rolling deck. He kept a wary eye out for predators, above and below the surface.

No sooner had the Black Mist withdrawn over the horizon than scores of boats put out to sea. The waters were awash with plunder, and if you weren’t fast, you ended up with nothing.

He’d spotted the floating man first and had already fought off six sewer-jacks trying to reach him. Damned if wharf-scum like them were going to steal this ocean bounty from him.

The big man had been drifting on a bed of what looked like the remains of a giant Krakenwyrm. Its tentacles were pulped and bloated with noxious gasses, which was all that had kept the big man’s armored form afloat.

He dropped his catch to the deck and laid him out along the gunwale before casting an appraising eye over his body.

A heavy iron hauberk of ring and scale, rugged, fur-lined boots and, best of all, a magnificent axe tangled in the straps of his armor.

“Oh, yes, make a few Krakens out of you, me beauty,” he said, dancing a happy jig around his boat. “A few Krakens indeed!”

The big man coughed up brackish seawater.

“Am I still alive?” he asked.

The fisherman stopped his happy jig and slid a hand towards the long knife at his belt. He used it to open fish bellies. No reason he couldn’t use it to open a throat. Wouldn’t be the first time a salvager had helped someone on their way to the Bearded Lady to claim a prize.

The big man opened his eyes.

“Touch that knife again and I’ll cut you into more pieces than that damned Krakenwyrm.”

“You should have killed her.”

My brother settled two cubes of sugar neatly in a slotted spoon suspended on the fine lip of his teacup. His gleeful attention turned to the pouring of the tea. The wrinkles on his face pulled back into a smile and a delighted giggle escaped as he watched the shapes melt and fall into each other. Unable to flee, the last remnants of sweetness collapsed under the dark brew.

“Lady Sofia will not be a problem,” I said.

Stevan batted a hand in the air, annoyed. “Today maybe, but tomorrow? Emotions fester if left unchecked, sister.” He looked up at me, questioning. “Better to snuff the spark before it sets the house on fire, no?”

“I have spoken to the Arvino’s principal intelligencer—”

“You intelligencers and your deals. I still say she betrayed her house and should pay for it with her life—”

“There may come a time for that,” I said, softening my tone. “But I have made the agreement. Adalbert will see she stays out of trouble. She is his responsibility.”

My part in the discussion was over. Stevan leaned back in his chair with a look of begrudging acceptance and picked at the blanket laid over his lap.

“That man could use another pair of eyes installed in his head,” Stevan harrumphed quietly. In Stevan’s view, it was never about the pursuit of a solution, just the end result. For my brother, the fixes I doled out could make many problems in Piltover disappear. Rarely did he consider the choices leading up to those decisions.

I held my cup in one hand and let the other drift absently to my hip, taking comfort in the grapple line spooled there. Stevan was partially right. End results were nice, but I much preferred the chase.

I watched Stevan through the steam of my drink. He pursed his lips as if deciding something. The pressure whitened the skin on his chin and highlighted the age spots that crept up past the silk wrapped around his neck.

“There is something else,” I said.

“Am I that obvious, sister?”

I think he would have blushed if his weak pulse had allowed it. He smiled painfully instead and pulled a folded piece of paper and a beaded chaplet from a drawer in the desk between us. Stevan rolled his wheeled chair back, coughing with the effort. On the chair, he turned small levers, the modest effort driving little cogs that drove bigger cogs, until the clockwork mechanism pushed the wheels toward me, and him with it.

“Lady Arvino’s short-lived engagement was not the only thing uncovered during this mess,” he said. “This was found on one of the Baron’s men during the clean up.”

I set my cup down in its pale saucer and took the scrap of paper and chaplet he offered. I shifted the balance of the blades beneath me, and their sharpened points dug deeper into the rich carpet.

The edges of the note were charred, and a greenish hue wicked through the paper from the ragged singe. The chaplet had been well loved; the facets of the glass prayer stones were burnished and smooth.

“Camille.”

My brother only said my name like that when he was serious. Or when he wanted something. I unfolded the note, a waft of Zaun’s acrid unpleasantness rising with it. I took in the strong lines. The diagramming was neat and orderly, the flowing script precise. My eyes found the artificer’s mark just as Stevan confirmed it.

“If Naderi has returned—”

“Hakim Naderi is gone.” The words fell from my mouth, a reflex.

It had been more than just years since the crystallographer had served as lead artificer for our house, it had been a lifetime.

Stevan contemplated his next move. “Sister, you know what this is.”

“Yes.” I looked down at the paper; the diagram mirrored the mechanical and crystalline construction that pulsed within my chest.

I held my own heart’s design.

“We thought them all destroyed. If this exists, others could as well. I could finally be free of this chair,” he said. “To walk about my house as the master of his clan should.”

“Perhaps it is time to let another take on the responsibility of clan master,” I said.

It had been many years since Stevan had been able to navigate the halls on his own. Something his own children and grandchildren never let him forget. This wasn’t just a piece of paper and a string of prayers. For Stevan, this was a map to immortality.

“This is only one schematic,” I continued. “You believe if we uncover the rest of Naderi’s designs, our artificers will be able to recreate his work. There would still be the question of how to power it—”

“Camille. Please.”

I looked at my brother. Time had not been kind to a body born frail. But his eyes, after all these years, his eyes were still like mine, the Ferros blue. That deep cerulean couldn’t be watered down by age or ailment. His eyes were the same luminous color as the hex-crystals lighting the drawing I held before me. His gaze pleaded with me now.

“You and I, we have led this house to greater success than Mother and Father ever dreamed,” he said. “If your augmentation can be repeated, this success—our success, Camille—it can go on forever. This house will ensure the future of Piltover. Indeed, we will ensure progress for all of Valoran.”

Stevan always had a flair for the dramatic. Coupled with his weaker constitution, it had been difficult for our parents to deny him anything.

“I am not the intelligencer for all of Valoran. I may find nothing.”

Stevan gave a relieved sigh. “But you will look?”

I nodded and gave him back the schematic, but kept the chaplet, tucking the twisted loops into my pocket. I turned to leave the study.

“And Camille? If he’s alive, if you find him—”

“It will be as it was before,” I said, stopping my brother before he could unearth more of the past. “My duty, as always, is to the future of this house.”

The late afternoon crowds near the North Wind Commercia still swarmed in anticipation of the Progress Day revels. The people’s faces were flushed with the effort of making ready for the city’s annual observance of innovation. However, it was not they, but a foreign trader tottering from drink that revealed my second shadow.

“By an Ursine’s frozen teat,” the trader said, frustrated with the press of the crowd. He pushed away those who had stopped to assist him. “I need no help.”

Piltover’s worker bees thrummed around us, all except for one blonde drone at the edge of the square. I kept her in view as I leaned down to the trader in front of me.

“Then get up,” I told him.

The Freljordian looked up at me. His annoyance had him reaching for the carved tusk dagger at his waist. I met his glare and watched it slip down past the hex-crystal in my chest to my bladed legs. The man released his grip on the knife.

“There’s a good boy,” I said. “Now get out of my way.”

He nodded dumbly. The trader backed away, and the mercantile hive mind of Piltover broke and reformed around him as he stumbled his way across the street. Only my shadow escort remained still, watching me from a distant market stall.

I continued through the crowds, the people parting easily before me. When the opportunity presented itself, I ducked into a blind alley and fired my barbed grapple lines into a high wooden cross brace above the corridor. I drew myself up into the darkness above and waited.

A moment later, my escort entered the alleyway. Her clothes were layered and nondescript enough not to draw attention in the promenade levels of Zaun, but the ornamented whip at her side said Piltover, or at least a very generous sponsor. I let her walk a pace forward into a shaft of light that would blind her. Once she was in position, I dropped in behind, the tips of my blades slipping neatly into the cobblestone gristle.

“Did you lose something, girl?” I said, letting a low growl roll over my whisper.

Her hand crept toward the black leather handle of her whip. She was tempted, but good sense seemed to win out.

“It seems I’ve found it.” The girl raised her open hands to her shoulders. “I bring a message.”

I arched an eyebrow.

“From your brother, ma’am,” she said.

Stevan’s drama was going to be the death of someone if he wasn’t careful.

“Give it here.”

The girl kept one hand up and used the other to pull a small note from her tightly cuffed sleeve. The wax seal carried the Ferros sigil and Stevan’s personal mark.

“Move more than an eyelash, and I will slit your throat,” I said.

I opened the note. I could feel my annoyance rise like a fever. Stevan had taken it upon himself to hire me a helper. In case my inquiry stirred up any “lingering sentimentality” that prevented me from seeing to my duty.

I told myself he meant well, but even after all these years, it seems he did not trust me with Hakim. It was cowardice to hide these feelings behind his lap blanket and not tell me this to my face before I left.

“I should kill you for delivering the insult,” I said, weighing her response. “Your name.”

“Aviet.” She kept her hands and voice even. She was young, not even an augmented finger.

“And you took this assignment knowing the possible consequence of my irritation?”

“Yes, milady,” she said. “I hoped if I pleased you, there might be a more… permanent position within your house.”

“I see.”

I turned my back to her and began walking out of the alley, giving her an opportunity to come at me if that was truly her intention. I could hear her exhaled breath and a raspy jangle as she brushed the coiled steel of the whip at her side. Her footsteps followed.

“Do we have a destination, milady?”

“Church,” I said, patting the chaplet in my pocket. “Keep up.”

The First Assemblage of the Glorious Evolved was technically still within Piltover, but only just. Here, past the Boundary Markets, the pernicious odors of the city below outweighed the celebratory smell of roasting meats and sweet cakes. The Zaun Gray rolled in like a low tide. It lapped at one’s legs and condensed along soot-covered merchant awnings into puddles of clouded muck.

I turned to the girl. “You will stay here.”

“I’m to follow you,” Aviet said. “Your brother’s—”

“You will stay here,” I said again, leaving no room for argument. My patience for my brother’s game was thinning. “The Glorious Evolved are fervent believers. They do not take kindly to the unaugmented.”

I looked over my new assistant, daring her to respond. Aviet shifted her weight slightly to her back foot. She still itched for a fight, to prove herself, but was unsure if this was the moment.

I smiled. “There’s time enough for that later, girl.”

The entry of the old building gave way to a dim foyer set back from the main hall by an iron lattice. Through the diamond patterns of welded metal, several clusters of yellow-orange therma lamps illuminated the congregation. The 50 or so people there murmured in rolling unison, giving the impression that a great machine breathed beneath them. Velveteen fabrics in dark colors were draped over the parts of their bodies that were still flesh, while their metal arms and augmented legs were exposed to the warm light. Here, high-end augmentations mixed with those of a more utilitarian function. Piltovan or Zaunite, it didn’t matter to the Glorious Evolved. These designations were secondary to their higher pursuit. In the center of the group, a young woman with mechanical elbows reached out to a man with a sleek metal jaw.

“The body is frail,” she said to the man. “The flesh is weak.”

“The machine drives us forward,” the group responded together. The words echoed in empty air above them. “The future is progress.”

I hadn’t come to bear witness. I kept to the shadows, ignored by the augmented flock, and continued my search.

I heard the soft gurgling of Brother Zavier’s esophilter before I saw the man. His balding head was tucked down to his chest as far as his breathing apparatus would allow. He was kindling a few spark lights on the corners of the side chapel’s altar.

Watching over him was an imposing figure outlined in cold lead and frosted glass. The Gray Lady, holy patron of the Glorious Evolved. The stained-glass window glowed from within, lit eerily by the arc lamps outside.

I approached the shrine. There were jars of organs. Single eyeballs floated like pickled eggs. Bundled offerings were wrapped in linen, some of it fine, some of it oily and ragged. A few flies buzzed among the discarded pieces of the congregation. One of the wrapped bundles moved. A little plague rat poked its nose out shortly after, daring me to take away its prize. The gauze of the newfound treasure caught on the edge, and the rest of the bundle tumbled away, revealing a desiccated finger. The rat scampered down, but Brother Zavier shooed it back into the darkness.

“Camille,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice underneath the wet burble. “Have you come for contemplation?”

“Information, brother.” I pulled the chaplet from my pocket, the glass beads tangling with the wire chain.

Brother Zavier turned to face me. His eyes were also under glass, magnified like those in the jars, although unlike those, his darted with life. I handed him the chaplet.

“Where did you find this?” He shook his head as he inspected it and then clucked his tongue. “Never mind, I should know by now not to ask those questions.”

He went back to attending his votive lights. “Several weeks ago, I met a man carrying this. He came to light a spark and ask her favor for the coming Progress Day.” Brother Zavier nodded toward the figure depicted in the window. The Gray Lady’s cloak was a mosaic of ash-violet glass, oxidized cogs, and blackened pistons. Her epithet was often invoked when an inventor felt at a loss due to inability or failure. Hers was a blessing that often required sacrifice.

“He had the tanned skin of the desert dwellers. Older than the usual foreign apprentas who pursue the auditions,” Brother Zavier continued.

“Do you know which clan he sought?”

“He said he was staying at a pay house near Clan Arvino.” The factory hum of the congregation fell away. “This evening’s testifying is over. My duties call.”

Brother Zavier patted my hand. He gathered his dark robes and made his way back to the main hall, leaving me to my contemplations.

Hakim had returned, but had not sent word. Not that the last conversation we shared had detailed how best to reach one another. I picked up the brittle finger from the floor and placed it back with the other offerings. It annoyed me, the idea of him petitioning like an ordinary apprenta. Hakim was spheres above Clan Arvino’s artificers. Through the cut-glass triangles and diamonds of the side chapel’s window, I could see Aviet standing beneath a streetlamp. She was still following orders… for the moment.

My indulgent silence was broken by a shuffling scrape, small, but much larger than a rat. I felt the hex-crystal in my chest vibrate in anticipation as I turned to face the threat.

“Are you her?” a small voice asked.

From the darkened corner near a metal bench, a little girl stepped forward. She could not have been more than six or seven.

“Are you the Gray Lady?” she asked again. Closer now, my hex-crystal pulse slowed, lighting her face in a soft, blue glow. In one arm, she carried a bundle wrapped in gauze, all too similar to the ones stacked behind me. The opposite sleeve of her dark dress hung empty.

Balanced as I was, I towered over her. I knelt down, bringing my face to her level, and gently touched the metal bench to arc some of the crystalline energy off my fingers. The girl watched the anxious spark reflect in the polished metal of my blades.

“Did you give up your legs for Progress Day?” she asked.

The Glorious Evolved celebrated the old Zaunite tradition of sacrificing something personal for Progress Day in the hopes the next iteration of invention would be better. It was a practice that could be traced back to the old days of the city, when the people of Zaun had to face rebuilding their lives after the devastation of “the incident.” The wealth and growth of Piltover on top of those scarred ruins served as evidence to many that the tradition had merit.

I looked at the little girl. It was not my legs that I had given up on a Progress Day long ago, but something far more dear.

“I chose these,” I said. “Because they better served my purpose.”

The girl nodded. The blue light between us had dimmed, but I could still see the black spider veins on the little fingers that clutched her bundle. It was rare for the blight to affect one so young in this part of the city. The Glorious Evolved often took in the sick, seeing the removal of dying flesh as a key to transforming a person’s life and faith through technology.

“Brother Zavier said it gets easier,” she offered.

“It does,” I told her.

The physicker attending her had been remiss his duty. The girl should have had both arms taken at once. I’m sure the surgeon explained away that lack of courage when holding the knife as a kindness, but waiting would do the girl no favors. If she did not have the other arm cut away soon, those spider veins would creep closer to her chest, eventually blackening her heart. The chances were slim she would live to see the next Progress Day.

The young girl bit her lip, hesitating before the next thought. In that moment, my eye caught movement through one of the larger stained-glass panels. I stood and watched several dark shapes approach. Aviet was no longer alone.

I stepped into the dim corridor to make my way outside.

“Do you miss them?” the little girl called out.

I didn’t turn back. I knew the girl’s hopeful face wavered like the row of spark lights on the altar. I knew because I remembered my own trembling doubt. So many years ago, Hakim had demanded of me a similar question. My heart? Him? Would I miss any of it? I touched my hex-crystal augment, assuring myself it still vibrated evenly. Just to the right of the Ferros sigil’s angular engraving I felt a small, fluid lettering. It was the mark of Hakim Naderi.

“No,” I lied.

Aviet was ready to fight, her blonde hair lit up like a halo under the streetlight. There were five men circling her like dock sharks. Their utilitarian augmentations cut jagged shapes in their silhouettes.

“Give us that pretty thing, and maybe we won’t kill you slow like,” the smallest one slurred loudly, eyeing the whip in Aviet’s hand. All the vexations of the day compounded, from Stevan’s brotherly chiding to my new unnecessary companion to the thought of Hakim having returned. I could feel the pent-up energy crackle down my spine, impatient to find release. A pompous miscreant and his dog-eared crew would do nicely.

“You didn’t say please,” I called out.

The mouthy one with the twitching nose looked up. “Ay, boys,” he said. “No worries now. Looks like there’ll be more than enough to go around.”

“Nice of you to join us, milady,” Aviet said.

“Yes, we was about to indulge in a little Progress Day remuneration,” one of the big ones with a copper augmentation said. His twin-sized partner tugged the brim of a dirty woolen cap over his fluid-filled eyepiece and sneered. “Your Grace.”

My arrival had distracted them, allowing their circle to become lopsided and a small breach to open up.

It was more than enough.

Speed and decisive thinking have always been my most cooperative allies, and I sprinted in toward the break, catching the lanky one across the shoulder with a long sweep. My bladed leg cut through the dirty tweed, a line of darker red blossoming quickly in the cloth, but it was the arcing blue of the subsequent hex-crystal energy that knocked him unconscious.

The chubby one and the one with the Sump accent took to Aviet, while the tall ones approached me. I let a dark smile spread across my face; after so much contemplation, this was exactly what I needed.

My two dance partners were not amused. Both had heavyset shoulders as thick as the double bells that rang out over the Iron Sand Commercia. They still had not decided who would approach first, and their indecision was my opportunity. I would take them both.

I stepped in toward the one with the eyepiece, letting my back leg rake down the coiled tubes of his copper-plated brother. He had misjudged my reach and scrambled to reconnect the sliced hoses to a sputtering chempump. A low swipe rendered his partner’s leg useless from the knee down. I waited a moment for the copper one to come back with his working arm. They always thought they could outmaneuver the second strike.

They were always wrong.

“Now collect your broken bits, and get out of my sight,” I told him. His brother was already limping into the shadows, his worthless leg dragging in the muck.

The metal of Aviet’s whip rang out in the alleyway. There was another wire-taut snap, and sparks rained down on the chubby one as he cowered, his face to the cobbles, tears streaking his grime-covered cheeks. That was only four.

I looked around. The rodent-faced one with the oversized ego was missing. I found him slinking back toward the Assemblage Hall.

The barb of my grapple line sunk deep in the angled stone above the hall’s entrance. I dropped in quickly on my Sump rat, tucking his and my weight together into a tidy roll.

When we came to a stop, I was on top. His fetid breathing was fast and shallow.

“Did you really think you could run?” I asked, low and even.

His head shook out a terrified no, but his greasy hand fingered a stick knife at his belt. He squinted from the blinding radiance of my hex-crystal so near his face. He was desperate to drive the knife into my thigh, anything to get me away from him.

“Go ahead,” I whispered.

His eyes widened in surprise, but he didn’t let my permission linger long. The tip of his knife pierced the dark leather, but went no further, stopped by the metal of my leg. Surprise registered on his face just as his hand slipped down with the force of the blow, driving the flesh of his closed fist along the edge of his own blade.

He did not swallow his scream like the others, and it rang out on the damp stone of the buildings.

I looked up as it echoed from the Assemblage Hall. The stained-glass window of the Gray Lady towered above us. A small face was pressed to the colored glass, watching.

I leaned in and let the blade at my knee almost kiss the fluttering pulse in the neck of the man beneath me.

“Hunt here again, and I will end you,” I promised.

Realizing he had been granted an extra life, my prey pulled himself away in an awkward crab walk. Once there was enough distance between us, he got up, clutching his dripping red hand, and ran for some dark hole to lick his wounds.

I could hear Aviet winding the metal of her whip.

“I heard you didn’t have a heart under all those mechanics,” she said, her interest sparked. “Perhaps the rumors are mistaken.”

“Mind your manners, girl,” I told her coldly as I walked out of the alley. “Or I’ll mind them for you.”

The Boundary Markets and the Assemblage Hall were always steeped in shadows, overwhelmed by so much progress towering above them. But it had truly become night by the time we reached the pay house nearest Clan Arvino. After some proper encouragement, the innkeeper became quite generous with his detailed ledger, although his handwriting left much to be desired. Naderi was either somewhere in the basement or on the third floor. I left Aviet to the cellars, while a grapple line gave me access to an open window on the third floor.

The small forge at the back of the room had burned down to embers smoldering under a crust of ash. I crouched through the window and stepped inside. The room was dim, with only a single lamp lighting a small desk. But it was the man asleep at the desk that caught my breath, the curls of dark hair and the desert-tanned skin. The vibration of my hex-crystal stuttered. Perhaps he, too, had stalled time for himself.

“Hakim,” I called out softly. The shape at the desk moved, waking slowly from sleep. He stretched with the grace of a cat and turned. The young man wiped the sleep from his eyes in disbelief. He was so much like Hakim it hurt.

But it was not him.

“Mistress Ferros?” He shook himself more awake. “What are you doing here?”

“Have we met?” I asked.

“No, not exactly, milady,” he said, almost embarrassed. “But I have seen your face often.”

He went back to his desk and shuffled some papers, pulling out one that was slightly older and more worn than the others. He handed it to me.

The lines were strong, the inkwork neat and orderly, and the shading precise. It was Hakim’s work, but it was no diagram. Instead, it was a drawing of my face. I couldn’t recall posing for it. He must have sketched it from memory after working in the lab one night. My hair was down. I was smiling. I was a woman in love.

The sting was so sharp, I couldn’t help but take a breath. I didn’t say anything to the young man in front of me now. I couldn’t.

“It could have been drawn yesterday, milady,” he said, filling the silence.

He meant it as a compliment, but it just magnified the acres of time that stretched on in my mind.

“My uncle carried this with him until he passed.”

“Your uncle, he’s dead?”

“Yes, Hakim Naderi. Do you remember him?” he asked.

“Yes.” The word stuck in my mouth and wrapped itself around a selfish question I had carried for far too long. One I was never sure if I wanted the answer to. If the pain of memory was to overwhelm me with a thousand little cuts, better to open them all at once and be done with it. I looked at the young man who looked too much like Hakim. “Tell me, did your uncle ever marry?”

“No, milady,” he said, unsure if he was going to disappoint me. “Uncle Hakim said that to love your work was more than we could ask for in life.”

I had wept all my tears long ago, and so there were none left to come to me now. I picked up the stack of papers and set the drawing of my face on top. The lines of ink wavered in the blue light of the machine that replaced my heart. What I was. What I gave up. All the sharp-toothed sacrifice that made me who I am today. All of it was rendered in painstaking detail. I could hold the past, but never have it again.

“This is all of it? All of the work?” My words came out a dark whisper.

“Yes, milady, but…” His voice trailed off in disbelieving horror as I set the bundle on the banked coals and blew gently. The oiled parchment ignited and quickly burned a red-orange. I watched the past bubble and darken until nothing but cinders and dust was left. It was the young man that pulled me back to the present.

Hakim’s nephew shook his head slowly, his disbelief palpable; I understood how the shock of losing so much so quickly could be overwhelming. He was numb. I escorted him down the stairs to the street below. He adjusted the leather satchel on his shoulder and stared at the cobbles.

He looked back to me; the air of defeat was replaced by one of growing fear. Having been so lost in my own past, I took less notice of the shadows on the street. I barely heard the metallic jangle of wire. The lash of the whip came fast, binding my arms to my side.

“That’s far enough, milady,” Aviet said. Her voice was smug. I watched her look Hakim’s nephew over.

“Is this what my brother paid you for?” I had suspected as much. Aviet had been watching for an opportunity all evening. My distraction at finding Hakim’s nephew seemed as good an opportunity as any.

“Yes,” she said. “All of us.”

Two big men stepped onto the cobbles, their repaired augmentations catching the streetlight. The chubby one and his little rat-faced counterpart followed behind. They were the same men from the alley behind the Assemblage Hall. The chubby one shoved a knife at Hakim’s nephew, while the other smiled his rodent smile and bound and gagged the young apprenta.

The juggernaut with the newly connected chemtubes stepped forward. His fingers twitched, eager to return the violence I had visited on him earlier.

“Mind the crystals, Emef,” Aviet said. The whip tightened, and I felt metal cuffs close around my wrists. She walked around to stand next to Hakim’s nephew. “We’re to collect them and Naderi, or no one gets paid.”

Was all of this for my brother’s jealousy? I knew Stevan felt the tide of years slipping away and saw me standing near immortal in all of it. But he truly had no idea the cost of my duty to the family. Could he not see what it would cost him now?

“And the rest?” the copper man asked, smiling at me as if he were about to tuck into a Progress Day feast.

“All yours,” replied Aviet.

“It was nice of you, Your Grace, to demonstrate your talents earlier,” he said as he pulled his augmented arm back into a fist. He obviously felt no need to hide the telegraph when facing a bound opponent. His grin widened. “It will make this go much quicker.”

The metal knuckles connected with my jaw. He expected me to fight it, but instead, I let the punch take me down to a knee. The inertia forced his heavily augmented arm to come down to the ground with me. I tasted my own blood on my lips, but it was he who was off balance for the moment. The rest of the gang’s prattle went silent.

“You haven’t seen all my tricks,” I said as I stood.

The energy of my hex-crystals coursed through me, the power building up like a wall. The juggernaut’s brother attempted to step in, bringing his own augmented fist down on the glowing buffer. The shield popped and hissed, but held. It was my turn to smile.

Aviet grabbed the trailing handle of the wire whip, hoping to shake me free of the energy field. She yanked hard to pull me off balance. She had no idea how long I’d lived my life on a knife’s edge.

My hands still bound, I leapt forward into a spinning kick, slitting the throat of the second juggernaut and coming down to impale the first. The tail of the whip snaked out of Aviet’s hand. She called to the two who still held Hakim’s nephew.

“Abandon the job, and I’ll kill you both.”

“Do you still think I have a heart now?” I asked her, her two goliaths lying dead at my feet.

Aviet was unsure, but stood her ground.

“I am the sword and shield of Clan Ferros,” I told her, ice enunciating every word. “My brother seeks to kill me to extend his brittle life for a few more selfish moments. His desires have betrayed his duty and our house.”

I felt the crystals pulse faster.

“And you will not live to see the morning,” I said.

I channeled the crystal’s energy for a moment, building its intensity until the shield that had once surrounded me became an electrified prison. There would be no escape.

I leapt into the air, higher than before, and came down hard, shattering the metal that bound my wrists and the cobbles between us. The force of the impact knocked over Aviet, her two remaining thugs, and Naderi’s nephew. The street had ruptured in a crater, and dust hung in the air. The fight Aviet had been looking for since we met, to prove herself to my brother, was not going as planned. The heels of her leather boots scuffed the stone of the street, her body announcing her retreat before even her mind had fully agreed to it. I read her fear as she stood facing me. Whatever my brother had told her of me, she had sorely underestimated. Aviet saw that any trace of the mercy I carried before had been boiled away by the full revelation of my brother’s betrayal.

I stepped forward and let my back leg arc around. I leaned into the blade as it connected. Aviet struggled to keep what was in her belly from spilling out, but it was a futile effort. I made short work of her last two goons, and the alley behind the pay house was quiet again. I picked up Aviet’s blood-soaked whip from the street.

The nephew of Hakim Naderi had backed himself against a wall in his panic. The young man’s breath was coming in panting waves through the dirty cloth that gagged him. I approached him as you would an animal you didn’t wish to startle. I untied the bindings at his wrists. I offered him my hand, and his fingers trembled at my touch. As soon as he was set upon his feet, he let go.

He had seen the violent face of my duty, what I could never bring myself to show Hakim, and I had let it happen. The softhearted woman I once was had truly been burned away, leaving only a cold darkness and gray ash.

“The tests,” he said, his chin quivering with a different kind of terror. The reality of the evening was coming to bear as he realized none of this was a dream. “What am I to show the artificers tomorrow?”

“You studied under your uncle?”

“Yes. He taught me everything, but the designs—”

Hakim’s nephew knew his options, either come to work for me or give up his life’s work. My position as intelligencer would not allow the knowledge he possessed to fall to another house. In his frightened eyes, I saw his innocence of the world sacrificed. I was a murderous savior and a dark protector. In this moment of cruel understanding, I had become his Gray Lady, a steel shadow to be feared and venerated.

“You will build them better tomorrow,” I said.

Unable to process his thoughts into words, he nodded his head and stumbled into the night. I prayed he would rebuild his resolve before the dawn. Otherwise, there would be nowhere to run that I could not catch him.

I stood and looked out over the balcony of my brother’s study. A chilled breeze ruffled the pennants that hung from the eaves of the house. The entire city stretched out before me.

The doors to the study opened, and for a moment, I could hear the preparations for tomorrow’s influx of apprentas. In those voices and quickened steps, I heard the years behind me unfolding, all of them too similar to separate. All of them save two: The one where a handsome man from the Sands danced away with my heart. And the one where I demanded the same man carve it away.

How often had Hakim come here with me between those two slivers of time? The breeze that teased the pennants would catch the curls of his hair as he stood on the balcony. “Such promise,” he would say as his eyes danced over the glittering towers of the city, the glow of Zaun lighting the buildings from below, “such a delicate machine, all these parts working together.”

I told him what my father told me, that this was the promise of progress, the promise of Piltover. It moved our city forward, but, I cautioned, one ill-shaped gear could threaten it all. One cog that rejected its role could destroy the entire machine.

Stevan’s chair creaked along the carpet. My fingers ached for the curls of Hakim’s hair or even the solace of the chaplet’s polished glass in my pocket. Instead, I coiled Aviet’s whip into tighter circles in my hands. Hakim so wanted to draw me out of this darkness, only realizing too late that my work, my duty to my family, was something I could no more cut away than my own shadow.

“Camille?”

I said nothing, unable to tear my eyes from the fragile view and my even more fragile thoughts of the past. The clockwork mechanism ticked, and the wheels of Stevan’s chair brought him up behind me.

“You’ve returned,” he said. “Aviet?”

I tossed Aviet’s whip on the woolen blanket laid over his lap.

“I see.”

“She served her purpose,” I said.

“That being?” For having sat so long in that chair, my brother was an artful dancer. He plucked at the wire of the whip.

“To remind me of mine,” I said.

“Your purpose?” Stevan’s initial nervousness slipped into agitation. He knew he would die tonight. He had been caught, and he couldn’t run, especially from me. His only consolation was to try and wound me just as grievously before his time expired. Bound as he was by his frailty, the only weapons left to him were words.

“Your duty is to me,” he said. “Just as it was to our father.”

Duty. My father. The right words could cut more deeply than a knife.

“You are here to serve me,” he growled.

“No, I swore to serve this house.” The oath I had taken pricked fresh in my mind, the oath of all intelligencers. I repeated it now without effort or remorse. “To this house, I will be true and faithful, putting its needs before my own. To this, I will commit mind, body, and heart.”

They were the same words I told Hakim the night I had ended things between us. I could not be his, for I had promised myself to another.

“That duty of intelligencer was meant to be mine.” Stevan’s voice wrenched me back to the present. He gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles whitened. “You swore an oath to our father, and what did you do? He died because you were not strong enough. And then you nearly deserted this house. For what? Love? Attention? Where was your duty then?”

He spat the words in the space between us. These spider veins, this blight, I had let it fester far too long. What kindness had I shown this house in ignoring his madness?

“I cut out my heart for the family. For you, Stevan,” I said. “I have given all that I am. After all these years, can you say the same?”

Stevan sputtered like a wet spark, desperately trying to flare to life, but knowing there was little left to catch fire.

“Father just gave this to you, but I was the one who spent my entire life proving to him I deserved it,” he said. Disgust weighed on his words. My brother’s anger ran faster, the toxicity poisoning the air like a chem spill. “You may see me as your betrayer, but you are the one responsible, sister. If you could be trusted to make the right decisions, I would not have to step in.”

I had let him become this monster. I tolerated his grim plots and motivations all because I was unwilling to face a future without him, a future where no one remembered the woman I was. If I had been stronger in my resolve, I could have ended this years before. I had chiseled away parts of myself, but in all that time, I never had the courage to cut away the piece I knew would blacken our house.

“That night, I would have run away with Hakim if you had not made the effort to remind me of my duty,” I said.

He had come to me, bloody and broken, forcing me to confront a reality where I had abandoned my charge. Even when I discovered the truth years later, that he had been behind his own attack, I had been relieved. On the brink of a decision clouded by sentiment, my brother had given me the hard push that let me separate honor from emotion. I knew that, without it, I might have given up who I was meant to be. It was his dark encouragement that let me take on fully the mantle I wore now.

I moved toward him and let my fingers rest on his shoulder. I could feel his aged bones beneath the rich silk and parchment skin. The vibrations in my chest built. Stevan looked up at me, the blue of his eyes hardening like chips of broken glass as the energy around my augmentation grew.

“You have always been my responsibility, brother.” The chill in the air entered my words. “Stevan, I will fail you no longer.”

I could feel the charge electrifying the hair at the back of my neck. I let my hand drift from his shoulder to the edge of his face. The boyish lock of hair that fell over his temple had thinned and disappeared years ago. The spark arced through my fingertips and enveloped Stevan.

It didn’t take much to push his heart over the edge, the atrophied muscle that drove my brother to such dark places finally seized in his chest. His eyes closed, and his chin sagged in my hand.

The vibration of the crystals in my chest slowed to an even rhythm. I turned back to face the city. Tonight’s cold would settle in her metal bones, but tomorrow, she would continue to push forward, to pulse with life. To progress.

Such a delicate machine.

Long before she became a Truth Bearer of her people, Illaoi had been an acolyte priestess at a Buhru temple on the coast. Every morning, she went down to the shoreline to exercise in the sun. She tried to focus on the principles her teachers held dear. Discipline. Motion. Strength.

She’d been alone on the beach one morning when the sea dropped low, lower than a low tide. The lookouts on the serpent-caller towers began ringing their alarm bells and pointing toward the horizon.

A Great Wave loomed, rushing toward shore with the strength to pulverize bone and rip swimmers out to sea.

In the moments after the alarms rang out, fear blanked Illaoi’s mind. Her teachers’ lessons abandoned her all at once. Do I have the time to escape? she wondered. Should I just stand here?

She glanced at the wave, then at the waterline. At her feet, she noticed a swarm of pink crabs. The wave had sucked the water away, and the crabs were frozen absolutely still on the wet rocks, paralyzed by sunshine and surprise and indecision.

Little creatures, too small to understand the fear they felt. A crab couldn’t do much to avoid a wave like that.

Illaoi could. She shook herself into action and sprinted to the temple gates just in time for the priestesses to slam them shut. As she perched on the temple’s parapet and watched the wave hit the shore, Illaoi thought about how she had stood in paralysis and fear.

I could have died. It was the closest she’d come to death in her sixteen years.

“I won’t do that again,” she told her teachers. Nagakabouros, the Mother Serpent, loved those who grew and changed. She had no sympathy for those who carried on as before while the wave bore down on them.

These days, something about the streets of Bilgewater reminded her of those frightened crabs.

It was noon. The sun was high and hot. Usually, the streets would be filled with sailors celebrating shore leave, or sea-monster hunters spending their earnings. But today, the streets were full of people hurrying about their business heads down, silent.

Bilgewater was on the edge of a civil war, but this was no battle of fresh and eager wills. Sarah Fortune and Gangplank were fighting the same damned war they’d fought already. The same war they’d fight a hundred times, if they could. Gangplank wanted his throne back; Sarah wanted him dead. The city stank of the stagnation lurking in their hearts. Each believed that victory would give them the things they had lost. Respect, perhaps. Justice for the long-lost dead. Something to soothe the pain of defeat and failure.

It would be so much easier if I cared nothing for either of them, Illaoi thought. But Sarah was her closest friend—and Gangplank, her former lover. Never before had two people been so trapped by their past, and so eager to waste their potential.

Illaoi glanced down at the lockbox under her arm. “And this is your fault, too,” she muttered.

The lockbox screamed back at her.

Its screams were quiet, just soft enough that they were hard to hear without listening closely. But whenever Illaoi focused on them, a hateful presence started scrabbling at the edge of her mind.

The fellow within the lockbox—the screamer who hurled horrible, muffled imprecations at Illaoi day and night—was to blame for everything.

It was he who put the shadow on Sarah’s soul.

Just then, some of Sarah’s crew came marching around the corner. Cutlasses and pistols hung from every belt, and every knuckle was ornamented with brass. They were streaked with blood and sweat and gunpowder. The fighting had been hard.

And with them, of course, was Sarah Fortune herself. She looked exhausted. The right sleeve of her fancy captain’s coat was stained with blood. Her shoulders were hunched and her hat was tipped low, as if a cold rain only she could feel battered her from above.

“Hey, Illaoi,” Sarah called, her voice flat and sharp. “Let’s get this done.”

“Are you well?” Illaoi asked. “You look miserable.”

“I’ve been chasing Gangplank for a week.” Sarah pointed at the quietly wailing lockbox. “And that thing is still on this island, too. Come on, let’s finish this.”

They turned to a nearby artifact dealer’s shop. While Sarah’s crew remained on guard outside, guns drawn, Illaoi led the way inside.

The loupe in the owner’s eye flashed as they entered. “Illaoi!” he called. “It’s been too long!”

Jorden Irux was a spindly fellow with knees and elbows heading in every direction. He was also the only artifacts dealer in the city with mixed paylangi and Buhru heritage. Illaoi often went to him for help identifying the relics she couldn’t recognize.

“I have a puzzle for you, Jorden.” Illaoi thumped the lockbox down on his countertop.

“You have two for me,” he said, glancing at Sarah. “Captain Fortune herself in my little shop!”

“Don’t get weird about it,” Sarah growled. “Let’s get this over with.”

The moment Illaoi’s key clicked in the lockbox, Sarah shuddered. A sickly light blazed a slash of teal across the wall.

Inside the box sat an amulet. Three curved stones, carved in the Buhru style and looped together with a thin wire. They glowed brightly with the light of a trapped soul.

“Oh, that’s nasty.” Jorden, too, could hear the screams. “By the Goddess, that’s not...?”

Illaoi nodded. “Viego of Camavor.”

It had been only a week since this furious shade of an ancient king attempted to turn Bilgewater into a smoking crater. The whole city knew his name now, and knew to curse his memory. If he gets out of this amulet, he will do it all again.

“It’s a temporary solution,” Sarah said. She let out a short, bitter laugh. “We couldn’t figure out how to kill him for good. There’s no telling what he’ll do if he gets out of there.”

Illaoi nodded. “Our historians say that the stones are made of serpent-amber... but we do not know if shattering them will release the spirit, or kill it.”

“Goddess’s Tears? I’m not surprised,” Jorden said, using the Buhru term for serpent-amber. “It is so rare, only a fool would practice smashing it.” He leaned close and adjusted his loupe. “A Buhru artisan shaped these. Our people’s style is unmistakable. But there’s a marking here on the back... Where did this come from?”

Illaoi laughed. “The Shadow Isles, actually. Our people studied with the scholars there, before the Isles were transformed.” If Viego escapes, he will try to transform Bilgewater into a twisted graveyard, too.

“Let me look something up.” Jorden leaped off his stool and ran into the back of the shop.

A half second of prickly silence followed... and then Sarah turned to Illaoi. “I know what you’re going to say,” she said, grit in her voice. “So don’t.”

“I was not planning to say anything.” After their last fight, there was no use belaboring Sarah with a truth she refused to listen to. “I was not going to talk about your futile hunt for Gangplank, or what it’s doing to the city. I was actually planning to let us stand in awkward silence.”

Sarah scowled. “I’m having a terrible week. Don’t make it worse.”

They silenced themselves when Jorden burst back into the room. He carried a scroll covered with a strange script Illaoi didn’t recognize. And there was a drawing of... a tower?

“Look.” Jorden pointed to a matching symbol etched onto the back of the amulet. “The sign of its makers. The Brethren of the Dusk.”

“Gloomy,” Sarah said. “Never heard of them.”

“Religious order from the Blessed Isles. They died out long ago.”

“Damn.” Sarah shook her head. “Then that’s a dead end.”

Jorden caught himself. “Wait—I forgot. There is a mad hermit who claims he represents them. But... you know what people who spend too much time over there are like.”

The twisted spirits of the happy folk who had once called the Blessed Isles home were not good neighbors. A thousand years wandering under the shadow of the Black Mist had turned most of them into beasts—wraiths, specters, and mistwalkers contorted in endless hideous reflections of mortal weakness. Any living person who chose to live alongside those shades must be uncommonly strong, and very strange. Some of the mortals who made their home on the Isles worshiped death and disease. And spiders, too, for some reason.

But Illaoi had not yet met a Shadow Isles dweller she couldn’t flatten like a sea star beneath her Goddess’s idol. “Such beings do not frighten me,” Illaoi said. “Not long ago, we killed Thresh, the Isles’ greatest monster. Compared to him, parlaying with this hermit will be a simple task. He may know something about the amulet.”

They paid Jorden and stepped out onto the street. “I didn’t expect this would send you back to the Shadow Isles,” Sarah muttered. She seemed apologetic.

Illaoi nodded. Before trapping Viego in the amulet, they’d tracked and fought him on the Isles. Camping in collapsed ruins and sharing meals around a campfire were joyful when friends were there... but to go back so soon, alone, would be melancholy.

“You’ll need a ship. There’s a captain who owes me—Matteo Ruven. He knows safe routes to the Shadow Isles. But don’t let him know about the amulet.”

“Few are left in this city whom we can trust,” Illaoi agreed.

Suddenly, Sarah’s face turned red. Her brow tightened.

Ahh, I’ve said the wrong thing, Illaoi realized. She cannot trust me, because I will not fight in her heedless war against Gangplank.

“I know you are still furious with me,” Illaoi said. She struggled for a new way to say the things Sarah refused to hear. “But my friendship comes with... with challenge. With change.”

“I can hear everything the king says in that amulet,” Sarah blurted. “Did I tell you that? Every moment of the day and night. He talks about... my mother.” Her voice cracked, and her face contorted into a grimace. “I can hear that box whispering from all the way across the city.”

Goddess. That’s a burden.

Illaoi embraced her friend. The need came over her, and she did it, without worrying what Sarah would think.

At first, Sarah held back—but then she returned the embrace. Tears started at the corners of her eyes. “Guhh,” she sighed. “Okay. Fine.”

“You are meant for more than this,” Illaoi told her. “You are meant for better things.” She believed it. She’d never believed anything more. But no matter how many times she said it, Sarah never understood.

“Meant for better things?” Sarah rubbed her hand across a damp eye. “Tell that to Gangplank.”

Sarah must have had a serious claim on Captain Ruven, because he scrambled to make his ship, the Trained Rat, ready for sail the very next day.

When Illaoi arrived, the ship was swarming with sailors hurrying to make it seaworthy. Ruven hollered orders from the command deck. He was older, slender, and knobbly-elbowed, with a halo of frizzy, wind-blasted orange hair.

I could snap him in half, Illaoi thought. Those were her two categories of people—ones she could snap in half, and ones she could not. It made the world an easier place to navigate.

He waved her up to the command deck. “I know you,” he called. “You’re the Buhru queen.”

“Absolutely not,” Illaoi said. “I am a Truth Bearer. A priestess.” This will be one of the annoying ones, she thought.

“All right.” Ruven shrugged. “Ship’s a disaster today. But this is the kind of service you get when you only give me twelve hours’ notice.” He flashed her a disarming, jagged smile, and extended his hand for a shake. “There’s an empty cabin for you down below.”

“Will we leave today?” Illaoi asked.

“We better. Or Sarah Fortune will include me in one of her little dockside executions.”

The ship’s passageways were so cramped, Illaoi could barely fit her idol down the stairs into the lower deck. The enormous orb of sea-tempered metal was wider across than Illaoi’s muscled shoulders. Down here, the roof was too low to carry it comfortably on her back, and the passageways were too narrow to carry it at her side. She had to balance it on her hip and shuffle crabwise between the cannons.

“Excuse me,” she muttered, squeezing past a group of sailors with scrubbing rags and buckets. As she passed, she heard them cursing quietly. Sailors, in Illaoi’s experience, were usually full of motion, game for anything and everything—her favorite sort of paylangi. But this crew was sullen. Their brittle fear filled the ship as completely as the stink of sea salt and rotten ropes.

Bilgewater’s ill temper lives here, too.

When the ship lifted its anchor and turned to ride the wind, Illaoi made her way up to the breezy command deck to speak with Ruven again. The jagged roofline of the city was soon hidden by wave chop and clouds of soaring birds.

“Bilgewater to my rear, and all my troubles forgotten.” Ruven laughed.

“Is Bilgewater more frightening to you than the Shadow Isles?” The idea made Illaoi smile. “The mood there is foul, certainly. But the Shadow Isles are worse.”

“Hey, none of the spirits over there have it out for me personally,” Ruven said. “Our fearless queen, on the other hand... well. Between you and me, I’m lucky to still be alive.”

Illaoi raised an eyebrow. “What did you do?”

Ruven coughed out a nervous laugh. “I owe her. We have an agreement. I bring you there and back, and all my debts to her are cleared.”

Sending someone to the Shadow Isles seemed like a poor way to collect a debt. Your chance of losing the debtor to a wraith or a spider bite seemed a little too high. “You must owe her a great price.”

“Yeah. I tried to blow her up.”

“What?!”

“Look, I wasn’t working for Gangplank.” Ruven rubbed his face with his hands. “I was just against the new loot fees. I made some new friends... it was their idea.”

These were not the words of a man who faced his destiny bravely or took responsibility for his choices. Ruven seemed like he was tossed about by the whims of others.

“Captain Fortune does not care for such excuses,” Illaoi said. “These days, she solves problems like you with a pistol.”

“Yeah.” His voice dropped. “The crew is... not pleased. We lost a choice contract because of it. So I went to Fortune and I told her: I’m useful! Make use of me. My pa and I were pilots for hire to the Shadow Isles, back in the day. I know routes nobody else knows.”

“To be used by others is no freedom for a soul,” Illaoi said.

“Well, it’s better than being executed! Look, you’re friends with Fortune, right?” he asked. “Being enemies with her is exhausting. I may be a sorry old fellow, but I could still learn some new tricks.”

Illaoi sized him up. It isn’t likely, she found herself thinking. “Your life is ruled by stagnation,” she said. “The freedom you seek is impossible without motion. You need spiritual counsel, not... help with small talk.”

Ruven chuckled. “I mean, I’d take that too.”

Illaoi sighed. Even the most stagnant people could hide deep currents where the soul still moved and changed. Everyone deserves a chance to prove themselves worthy.

And she knew: If this man can change, then Sarah certainly can, too.

“Perhaps we can talk,” Illaoi said. “If we have time on the journey.”

Ruven loved to talk.

He told Illaoi about his father—a pilot for hire, perpetually lurking around Bilgewater’s busiest pubs, “copping free drinks off captains and fishing for gigs.” He wasn’t around when Ruven needed him most, but he was building a legacy, Ruven insisted, charting his route to the Shadow Isles.

“You’ll see it when we get there. It’s incredible. Only safe approach to the entire archipelago. Never seen a wraith on the beach there once.”

“Impressive. How did you learn it? Did your father show you?”

Ruven laughed. “No way! He used to hand me the charts, shove me into a dingy, and make me do the trip myself. All alone in the Black Mist, with him safe on the ship!”

“That is a great effort,” Illaoi said. “Any man who can teach himself a route to the Shadow Isles alone can turn his life around.” He is like Sarah, Illaoi thought. There is greatness within him. He must only find it.

In the final days of their trip, the daylight was less reliable. Each afternoon, an early “evening” crept across the sun and drowned its light in an exhausted gray. It was the Black Mist—its frayed edges, at least. The lookouts grew more tense. The Mist’s cover could give safe passage to furious wraiths of all kinds.

Illaoi always made the most converts to her faith among sailors who had been to the Shadow Isles. When they heard her preach against stagnation, they knew what she meant. Black sand shores. Rotten, twisted, leafless trees. Monuments of slick, dark stone, moist from ocean spray, buried by heaps of ancient loam.

As those haunted Isles loomed on the horizon, Ruven joked constantly and obnoxiously, ribbing sailors about their frowns. The Buhru term for people like him was wave-dodgers: those who shift back and forth on the beach, trying to keep their toes dry with frivolous and frightened motion. Many small steps to avoid a bigger one.

When the Isles were close enough to pick out the ruined towers on the hilltops, though, Ruven turned his frantic energy into action. He vanished into his cabin, then returned brandishing a bundle of paper scrawled with notes and diagrams. When he replaced the navigator at the ship’s wheel, he looked as if he were about to vomit.

“Time for me to prove my worth,” he told Illaoi. He turned to the crew in the rigging and shouted, “Half speed!”

The ship began a strange dance toward the shore. Ruven grappled with the wheel, throwing his scrawny weight into every urgent turn. The ship’s timbers groaned, and the tips of jagged rocks passed less than an arm’s length from the hull. She glanced at Ruven’s inscrutable papers. No wonder Sarah kept him alive. Whatever knowledge he has is useless in translation.

They came to a stop in a rocky little cove. Shattered stones hid it from the open sea, and sheer cliffs concealed the mast and sails from the shoreline. A rare safe harbor... and luckily, not too far from the monastery.

Ruven leaned against the wheel, exhausted. “And that’s how I earn my keep,” he said. “Tell Captain Fortune how impressive I am, will you?”

About twenty sailors—more than half the crew—went ashore for the mission. The monastery would be a few hours’ walk inland. Illaoi brought only her idol, a full canteen, and the lockbox.

“Stay close,” she told the crew. “My Goddess scorns the Mist, so the Mist fears her idol. We will be safe from it if we move together.”

The sailors fell into place behind Illaoi and Ruven as they pushed into the forest. Illaoi’s idol parted the Mist, revealing strange architecture and foliage on either side of their path. Everything was frozen in a moment of decay. Desiccated trees more ancient in life than the citadels of the Buhru capital scraped the sailors’ faces and shoulders as they trudged by.

Soon they found themselves among the ruins of a small town. Crumbling walls forced them to twist and turn through the underbrush. They slowed to pass, single file, along a tight path through the thicket—what might have once been an alleyway.

The dried bushes and trees all looked the same. “Do you even know where you’re going?” someone behind Illaoi demanded.

He was a small, wiry fellow with a patchy beard and a spattering of golden teeth. Another very snappable man.

“Yes,” Illaoi said. “Please chart your own path, if you would like. I can hurl you into the Mist in any direction you please.”

“Kristof? Shut up,” Ruven said. “Or you’re going in the brig when we get back on the ship.”

Kristof was furious. “We shoulda put you in the brig, after what you pulled with Fortune!”

“Stop this nonsense at once,” Illaoi commanded. But now everyone had joined the argument, and their raised voices were echoing through the forest.

Illaoi knew this would draw enemies. Behind the shouts, she could pick out a quiet crunching noise, like footsteps through heavy loam.

The thicket beside the path suddenly churned. Branches scraped against one another with a sound like blades drawn across bones. Clawlike brambles unfurled into hands. There was a face in every bush and tree, withered like those of the unshriven dead.

The arguing turned to screaming—and then the thicket smashed shut. The path was gone in an instant. The sailors bolted in sheer terror. She saw one dash into the woods, but he was slammed to the ground by a knotty branch. The trees closed over him, strangling his panicked shout.

Illaoi even caught a glimpse of Ruven’s back as he ran away through the trees, his papers scattering behind him. Coward, she thought. Then the wraiths were upon her.

The sailors nearest Illaoi fought back, but their swords did nothing—it was like stabbing a thornbush. The wraiths pressed forward through a hail of glancing blows and stabbed the sailors with splintered wooden limbs.

When a wraith lunged toward her, Illaoi ferociously swung her idol. Her strike was true—its body echoed like a hollow bucket and burst into pieces. When another rushed forward, Illaoi punched it so hard it snapped in half like a rotten fencepost.

Goddess, that’s satisfying!

The avatars of the Goddess specialized in muscular force. “Nagakabouros,” she shouted, “defend us!”

She lifted her idol in the air and slammed it down into the mud. The sailors staggered, but the wraiths flew back, repelled by the idol’s blazing green glow.

Paylangi always asked her: Where do the tentacles come from? She’d tell them, It doesn’t matter. The Goddess was everywhere, in everything that changed. She could go anywhere, and be anything, because anything could change.

A wraith, for example, could change into many tiny pieces of wraith.

A protective wall of tentacles erupted from the ground and began transforming wraiths into sawdust. Illaoi helped. Bushes and trees splintered. Knotty wooden heads went rolling through the mud like bowls. She caught a glimpse of a wraith flung high in the air, spreadeagled; it looked like a bird.

When the wraiths nearest them had fallen to pieces, Illaoi hefted her idol onto her shoulder, and the tentacles faded away. The trail was eerily quiet. There was no sign of the sailors who’d run off—not even distant screams. Even the dead were missing. Borne off, perhaps, or buried beneath roots.

“Collect your breath,” she told the group. “Who remains?”

There were only seven. Kristof was among them. “Should we go looking for the captain?” he asked. He didn’t seem enthusiastic. “We can’t sail away from here without Ruven.”

Illaoi saw Ruven’s bundle of charts lying on the ground, soaked through with mud. She picked it up and fished out the map she’d given him. Behind the grime, the way to the monastery was still visible.

On the ship, he’d seemed ready to change. But he’d returned to cowardice in the end—a stagnant soul, forever tossed about by the tide of others’ whims. I’d only be saving him to use him, she thought. Like Sarah and the others did.

And searching for him with only seven injured and exhausted sailors? They would surely die. Kristof and his crewmates did not deserve such a fate. The living can still change and grow, she reminded herself. The dead cannot.

Her decision was clear. “We must press ahead,” Illaoi announced. “To the monastery. We shall have to rely upon the charity of the hermit who lives there.”

It wasn’t long before the monastery loomed up out of the Mist. It seemed well maintained—its tall tower looked just like the one carved on the amulet.

As Illaoi approached the gate, a man leaped onto the path ahead of her. He looked so much like a beast of the Isles, she almost smashed him with her idol.

“Wait! It’s me,” Ruven croaked.

For a moment, the whole group simply stared. Ruven’s body was completely coated with mud. His jacket was soaked with blood. Dead twigs were trapped in his hair. He looked like he’d been run over by a herd of giant rock crabs.

Illaoi was relieved—for a moment. Then her frustration returned in full force. “That was a shameful thing you did,” she snapped. “Leaving your crew.”

Ruven seemed shocked. “I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

“I am never glad to see a man abandon his duty!” Illaoi did not hold back. “You told me you wanted to change. I did not see a man who wants to change on the battlefield today.”

Ruven shot the crew an embarrassed glance, and Kristof went for blood. “How’d you survive the Mist?” he asked.

A strained smile cracked the mud on Ruven’s cheeks. “I, uh...”

“Illaoi said running off by yourself was death.”

Ruven’s expression darkened. “If you’d like to know, I brought my own protection, actually. I was fine.”

Illaoi was disgusted. A protection he did not choose to share. An artifact of some kind? “We shall discuss your shame at a later time,” she said. “First, we must get inside.”

She turned and knocked on the massive wooden door. The sound echoed in some open space beyond. Then, high above, someone cleared his throat and said, “Who goes there?”

Illaoi could make out broad shoulders and a hooded head leaning over the parapet. “I am Illaoi, Truth Bearer of the Buhru,” she called. “I seek the hermit who represents the Brethren of the Dusk. May we take shelter here?”

The man paused for a moment. “I will let you in,” he said, his voice deep. “But do not lay a hand on any creature inside.”

“Creature?” one of the sailors whispered.

The doors slowly began to grind open. Each door was more than twice as tall as Illaoi, and enormously heavy. When they were cracked open about an arm’s length, she saw who was pushing them from within: mistwalkers.

They were spirits shaped like hunched, tired men and women, with long dragging arms and slack mouths ringed with fangs. But unlike others Illaoi had seen, they moved in passive, obedient silence, heaving against the door like dutiful footmen.

Illaoi recoiled, shocked—but the mistwalkers did not lunge for her. Behind her, the sailors reached for their weapons.

The man from the parapet stepped into view. “Do they frighten you?” he asked. “They are my companions.”

Illaoi had never seen anyone like him before. He was robed like a priest, but built like a boulder, with huge shoulders muscled by hard work. Not a man I could snap in half. In one hand, he carried a heavy shovel of dark, rugged metal, stained with dirt, as if he’d just come from digging these beasts out of their graves.

Illaoi noticed that his arms were not sleeved. Their bluish tone... that was his bare skin.

“Are you also a mistwalker?” She had allied with mistwalkers before, though it gave her no joy. Creatures trapped in the stagnation of death often brought pain to the living, and were an unholy affront to the sanctity of life.

The man smiled. “Are you asking if I am alive?”

“On these isles, it is a fair question!”

“A very private one, too.” He made a thoughtful shrug. “I am... a caretaker. Please, come inside.”

The courtyard beyond was filled with mistwalkers carrying scraps of wood and rocks, clambering among rows of gravestones. They paid the newcomers no mind. Though their mouths hung open and their eyes were vacant, they seemed to be driven by some strange mission.

“This is madness,” Ruven whispered. “He has an army.”

“He has protection of some kind, too,” Illaoi said. “Look. The Black Mist does not attack him.”

The hermit overheard them. “It does not need to. It has the Maiden to watch me.”

He pointed at the top of the tower. Illaoi caught a glimpse of a figure up there, but it retreated behind the parapet, as if ashamed to be seen.

“The Maiden?”

“Another... companion of mine.”

“And what is your name?”

“Yorick,” said the hermit. “I am the last of the Brethren at my post.”

She stared. No. He can’t be serious. “The last?”

“I’ve been here since all this started,” he said, gesturing at the Mist-choked sky. “I’ve been here since the Ruination.”

Illaoi had never imagined a home like Yorick’s. The empty halls of the monastery were alive with the motion of mistwalkers. They walked the clean-swept floors in silence, each fixed on some cryptic duty.

She felt her skin prickle and her mouth go dry. It was not fear—it was anger. He keeps the dead in servitude. Unconscionable. Disgusting. She kept this thought to herself, however. This man could still help save Bilgewater.

“You had trouble on the road,” Yorick observed. He gestured to a spiraling stairwell. “I have little in the way of mortal comforts, but there is clean water in the cistern downstairs. And a fire to keep you warm.”

While the others went down to wash on the lower level, Illaoi waited on the doorstep, gazing at the mistwalkers in the yard below. Before her journey with Sarah and their friends to stop Viego, if she’d met a man trapped in the rut of his life for a thousand years, leading an army of restless spirits... she’d have killed him on sight. And Nagakabouros would have blessed me for it.

Yorick appeared at her side. “You have business with me,” he said.

“I do.” She kept her voice calm with difficulty. “But I am not used to seeing spirits treated this way.”

“They are not trapped here, if that is what worries you,” Yorick said. “I search these islands for the tormented dead. Some of them stay here with me for a while, before they move on.”

“And what are they doing?”

“Building graves,” he said. “These are the people of the Blessed Isles. My countrymen, seeking rest and peace.” He paused for a moment, as if saying a prayer. “We can speak privately upstairs, in my library.”

The tower was made of huge, dark blocks of stone, smoothed by time and streaked black with torch smoke. It was older than the ruins of Helia, or the vaults Illaoi and Sarah had visited before.

He has been entombed here like a man dead for a thousand years. Stagnation incarnate. His politeness almost made it worse.

The chamber at the top of the tower was lined with bookshelves and lit by a cold, blue light filtering in through the window. Beside the door hung a pair of stone pauldrons with a cape of Black Mist roiling from them. And atop one of the lofty bookshelves, a nest of dark Mist and glowing blue light slowly turned on itself.

“That is the Maiden,” Yorick said. “She has been with me for centuries.”

“I thought you said they moved on.”

“When they are ready.” He closed the door behind them. “And, if you are ready, please show me who you are hiding in that box on your belt.”

Illaoi raised an eyebrow. “You can sense it?”

“The Maiden speaks to me. She told me whose spirit that is.”

Illaoi opened the box with the key around her neck. Yorick leaned forward to see, and the light of the amulet made a sinister dance across his craggy features.

“Viego of Camavor,” he said. He extended one huge, calloused hand toward the box—then stopped himself. “Since the Ruination, I’d hoped to see something like this. But... I expected more.”

“What did you expect?”

“That the Mist would be gone. But it remains. That the spirits would cease their suffering. But it continues.” There was an unreadable expression on his face. “Perhaps I expected that I would change.”

Illaoi felt a blaze of sympathy for him. She, too, had wondered if the Shadow Isles might change with Viego’s banishment, if the Mist might finally disperse. But that is a challenge for some greater strength than ours, she reminded herself.

“When you defeated him, I saw the lights in the sky,” Yorick said. “But the spirits were not freed, and the Maiden continued whispering in my ear. So my responsibility to them continued.” He gazed at Illaoi, his expression stony. “I am a member of a holy order, same as you. Long years of toil... that is our way. Persistence, faith, and dedication.”

Illaoi bristled. “Nagakabouros does not scorn dedication. She scorns stagnation.”

Yorick stood and went to the window. “Come, look at this.”

Spread out beyond the walls of the abbey, across miles of wild and Mist-wreathed hillsides, were thousands of tombs. Tombs carved by the hands of mortal artisans stood side by side with rough, makeshift ones assembled from rubble by the stumbling dead. Here and there, the endless acres of gravestones stirred with the motion of mistwalkers.

“Is that not the largest cemetery you have ever seen?” Yorick asked wryly.

It was, Illaoi realized, half as big as Bilgewater itself.

Yorick’s voice was tight with controlled emotion. “If there is any agent of change on these isles, I am it. I open the earth and bring the spirits to their rest. And the world around me changes.” He turned to Illaoi. “Do I not, then, honor your goddess?”

A constellation of beliefs netted Illaoi to the particulars of her faith. They were simple beliefs, clear and gracious and humanizing. Though her relationship with the Goddess had changed over the years, the core of her faith remained strong. Life is motion. To live fully is to change; to change is strength.

The living can change. The dead cannot.

Illaoi now felt that foundation shifting beneath her feet. Can the dead build a world of their own? Can they follow their own desires? No. Why would he think that?

She’d brought motion to beings trapped between life and death before. The Bloodharbor Ripper, Pyke, was one of them. But his grace had been given to him by Nagakabouros, and the Goddess had no part in Yorick’s domain.

“I suppose,” she finally admitted, “the dead could have their own kind of motion. But Nagakabouros would never keep spirits here beyond their years in life.”

“She would see them reborn?”

“Yes. As soon as possible! It would be a sin to deny them life for even a moment.”

“And this is our difference,” Yorick said. “You would banish spirits before their time.”

Illaoi knew that if the conversation continued, she’d never settle the issue of the amulet. So she changed the subject. “This is one spirit I’d like to banish.” She lifted the amulet by its chain and showed him the mark on its back. “Your order made this, but in the Buhru style. We hoped you could tell us how to destroy the spirit inside.”

Yorick took the amulet in his bare hand. It did not seem to trouble him the way it had troubled Sarah.

“I think I remember the woman who made this,” he said. He turned to his bookshelves and found a sheaf of fragile, gray parchment. “She was a Buhru sailor. She saw too many perish at sea. So she joined our order, to bring peace to the dying.”

The parchment was covered in an ancient Buhru script. Illaoi could pick out the old words well enough. This artisan had worked on gems made of serpent-amber—a technique practiced only by the Buhru. But she had also tempered the gems under high heat, to form a crystalline shell capable of holding an angry spirit. The technique she used was from the Blessed Isles.

“I cannot read Buhru myself,” Yorick admitted. “Does it say anything useful?”

Illaoi’s eyes wandered down the page. She picked out an illustration of some kind of blast furnace, powered by magic focused through prisms and lenses. A gyroscopic dynamo of light and flame. The illustration was labeled, The Spirit Destroyed.

That seemed clear enough. “She used your people’s machines to temper the gems. At the same heat, we could kill the spirit inside.”

“The furnaces?” He laughed sadly. “I used the blocks to make tombstones.”

They stood for a moment in silence again, thinking. Illaoi wondered how Sarah was doing. She wondered if, across all this distance, she could still hear the amulet speaking to her.

“There is one solution close at hand,” Yorick suddenly said. “You could hurl the amulet into a volcano.”

Illaoi glanced at him. “You are joking.”

“I am not. I have not gone this far in a thousand years, but volcanoes, at least, last that long.” He returned to the bookshelves and found a map rolled into an enormous sheaf. It showed the Blessed Isles as they had been before the Ruination, marked with roads and cities. “This one.” Yorick pointed to a tiny dot in a far corner of the map. “Scardover Cay. Half a day’s sail from here.”

“It has... exposed lava?” She felt ridiculous asking.

“Time changes these things,” Yorick said. “But it did, in my day.”

A thought occurred to Illaoi. If Pyke could see the truth in the Goddess’s ways, this man could, too. “It is still your day,” she said. “Come with us. You wanted to see this king destroyed. You may hurl him to his death yourself, if you like!”

Yorick coughed out a grim bark of a laugh. “It is beyond the Black Mist. I doubt I will be able to help you much when I am outside the realm of the dead.” He gestured to the Maiden. “My powers lie with the dead. And I have not left my post in a thousand years.”

“Then there is no better time to try it!” Illaoi urged. “Leave this place, if only for a day. I think you will enjoy the experience.”

Yorick considered for a moment. “What a curious idea,” he murmured. “Doing something because I would enjoy it.” He drew himself up straight, and crossed his huge arms on his barrel chest. “And you’re right. There is nothing I’d enjoy more than killing Viego.”

They all gathered in the courtyard to leave the monastery.

Ruven stood apart from the rest of the group. As Yorick directed his spirits to open the gate and let them out, Illaoi bundled the navigational charts she’d found in the woods, and went to talk to the captain.

“Have you settled things with your crew?” she asked. “Can you all return to the ship in peace?”

He would not look directly at her. “Sure. Yeah. We can walk back.”

“Did they threaten you? I have a mission. I will tolerate no interruption from you or the crew.” Still, Ruven refused to look at her. Frustration tightened her throat. “You must tell me if they plan a mutiny,” she muttered.

He shrugged. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t give a toss what they do with me. This is my last voyage, probably.”

Illaoi looked down at the navigational notes. He’s the only one who can use them, she thought. There will be time to bring him back to his senses once we’re on open ocean.

She handed him the paper bundle. “I expect focus from you,” she told him. “Dedication. A man can change his life, but he has to try.”

“Fine.” Ruven stuffed the papers into his mud-stained jacket.

They returned to the ship in frigid silence. Half the crew was dead, and Ruven was no longer on speaking terms with the ones remaining. As Ruven navigated out of the cove, Yorick stood at the railing and watched the Maiden standing alone on the sand.

“You are leaving her for the first time in a thousand years,” Illaoi said. “Do you feel any different?”

He lifted something from his collar: a small vial, filled with a clear, bright liquid. “The Mist’s whispers are quieter,” he said. “And the sound this makes—it is louder.”

Illaoi took a moment to realize what she was looking at. “Blessed water?”

“Indeed.” He hid the vial under his collar again. “At the monastery, this merely kept me alive. Out here, I pray it will bring me strength.”

The journey was a straight shot, half a day’s voyage to an island on the edge of the Shadow Isles’ archipelago. The crew kept the sails trimmed for speed, and Ruven stewed on the command deck. He hunched his shoulders, thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and kept his eyes fixed grimly on the horizon—and now and then, on the crew, too.

Illaoi approached him. “I know we said we would discuss Nagakabouros, and your place in Bilgewater,” she told him. “If you still wish for guidance, I am here.”

He glanced at her. There was something in his eyes—fear? “Maybe later,” he muttered.

“What did you discuss with your crew at the monastery?” They must have had choice words for him. Whatever they’d said, he needed to listen closely.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Look, I’m busy.”

Illaoi shrugged, and descended from the command deck to walk the length of the ship with Yorick.

She was surprised at how much she enjoyed it. When she didn’t have to look at his army of mistwalkers, it was easier to discuss his beliefs on their own merits. They spent all night deep in conversation. His beliefs were as sincerely held as hers, but his priorities were so strange. Healing the dead was more important to him than returning them to the light of life.

“I will never understand it,” she told him. “But I believe that you mean it.”

“I do not expect you to understand. But I am glad you listened.”

Most of the sailors went to sleep in the lower deck sometime before dawn. When the sun rose, the Trained Rat left the last of the Black Mist behind, and their destination came into view.

“There it is,” Ruven said. “The island. That shadow on the horizon.”

A handful of crew members gathered at the railing. There was a dark, conical blemish on the pale gray skyline ahead.

“Scardover Cay,” Yorick mused. “I’ve heard that people lived there, long before my time. I am not sure I believe it.”

Illaoi could pick out the stench of sulfur when they were still miles from shore. As they grew closer, the hazy shadow on the horizon resolved into a mountain of dark ash, running bare and treeless from the waterline to the lip of the crater. Here and there, it was studded with the stark forms of jagged rocks, each larger than a house.

As the crew lowered the anchor, Illaoi returned to her bunk to retrieve her idol. The belly of the ship was shadowed and quiet, with no sound louder than the creak of timbers and the slosh of waves against the hull. Here and there, crew members were still sleeping in hammocks strung from the ceiling beams.

Her idol was on her bunk. Carrying it awkwardly at her side, she made her way back down the center of the lower deck, between the cannons.

It’s so quiet, she thought.

Then she realized she couldn’t hear anyone snoring.

She put her hand on the nearest hammock and tipped it toward her. Kristof lay inside... and he was not breathing. His dry lips were parted, and his eyes stared blankly upward. Illaoi could feel the presence of his spirit, but he lay like one dead.

A magical stasis? This was not done by natural means.

She stepped swiftly to the next hammock. The sailor there was trapped in corpse-like stasis, too.

Every ship that leaves the Shadow Isles can carry as many stowaways as it has shadows.

“Reveal yourself,” she said. “Who did this?”

THUMP. Farther up the length of the ship, the hatch fell closed over the stairway, and the whole of the lower deck was drowned in darkness.

Illaoi crouched and tightened her grip on her idol. There was barely any room to fight in the lower deck. It was the only place on the ship where she was vulnerable. “You waited until Yorick and I were separated, didn’t you?”

A wink of blue light flared in the dark. “Yes,” a voice said. “And until the Mist was gone. Your new friend wields it like a weapon.” Ruven stepped out of the shadows between Illaoi and the stairwell. “I wanted to speak in private.”

A faint glow wreathed him. And behind him stood someone else.

It was a hunched, robe-swaddled spirit, dressed like a Blessed Isles scholar. His gowns were crisscrossed with arcane geometry and stained with black slime, as if he’d come wading out of some putrid swamp. Tendrils of Black Mist coiled around him. And above his tight, tarnished-gold collar sat a warped face of sagging, melted skin, split by an enormous, toadlike mouth. When his lips pulled back in a smile, Illaoi could see multiple rows of little pointed teeth.

“I know you’ve made a habit of stooping low, captain. But I did not expect this. You’ve made a pact with a monster.”

“I’ve made a pact with a man who helped me! That’s all I ever wanted—a little help.” Ruven’s lips twisted into a pained grin. “I’ve worked hard enough in my life, haven’t I? I don’t need spiritual work, Illaoi. I just need some help!”

The spirit raised his hand. He held an orb that glowed with the same blue light that flickered around Ruven. Black Mist flowed from it, as it flowed from the spirit himself. Then the orb flared, and Ruven’s head made a strange jerk.

Illaoi realized she’d badly misread this man. He didn’t want to do the work of changing. He wanted to be some leader’s lackey. He just wanted a more forgiving master than Sarah.

It was too cramped for her to attack, so she tried to keep the conversation going. “And where did you meet this spirit?” she asked, making her way forward between the cannons.

“Bartek saved me from the wraiths.”

Illaoi could not hold back her bitter laugh. “He’s using you. Be your own man, Ruven.”

Ruven hesitated, but the orb flared again. He jerked like a puppet brought back to stand at attention.

“Stop her,” Bartek said. His voice was rough and wet, like a gas pocket escaping from a bog. “Get the amulet.”

Illaoi did not wait to see what he would do. She took one silent, confident step forward into an open space and swung her idol as hard as possible into Ruven’s snappable little body.

He flew across the deck and hit the opposite hull of the ship hard, cracking the boards in half. Bartek recoiled in surprise and gave a frustrated shriek. “Foolish priestess!”

“Choose your champions better,” she said. “Or why not fight yourself?”

She approached him, and the creature’s craven retreat answered her question clearly enough. “My master has given me a weapon stronger than your Goddess,” he snapped. “And a champion to fight for me.”

Once again, the orb in his hand flared... and the captain stirred. Slowly, he lifted his broken body back to its feet.

“You cannot kill him,” Bartek told Illaoi. His lips parted in a wide, toothy smile, like the River King’s catfish mouth. “I can bring him back. The lantern-lighter’s gift has given me dominion over his soul.”

The lantern-lighter—Thresh! Illaoi stepped back. An artifact that ensnared souls, a gift from Thresh’s hand? By the Goddess. That’s no good.

Ruven moved like a pile of sticks held together with string. Illaoi could see his muscles bunching strangely on his arms and neck—driven by magic, not by his own will. With a twist of his cracked legs, he launched himself toward her with uncommon speed. She dove out of the way and dropped her idol, awkwardly, as she squeezed between cannons. It rolled across the boards of the deck between them.

They paused. Ruven sized her up with a cross-eyed stare. Illaoi took a sharp breath, and lunged for the idol. Ruven dashed forward and kicked her in the ribs. It was like being hit by a mortar shell—and now it was Illaoi’s turn to shatter the boards behind her. The idol flew out of her hand and straight through the hull, leaving a ragged gap as tall as Illaoi herself.

As her fingers slipped from the idol’s grip, she felt her vital connection to Nagakabouros fade. Damn! Fists it is, then. She struggled to peel herself off the deck and square up against Ruven.

“Lost your magic?” Ruven sneered.

“But not my faith. I have wanted to snap you in half for the last day,” Illaoi told him. “I think Nagakabouros will grant me my wish.”

But as she raised her hand to strike him in the jaw, Bartek also raised his. The orb in his palm flared. In the hammocks around the deck, glass-eyed sailors sat up, rigid as a board. Each leaped from their hammock like a Piltovan automaton.

“You profane the dead,” Illaoi snarled.

“They aren’t dead until I tell them to lie down and die!”

Bartek swung the orb, and the sailors swung for her. There were eight or nine of them, and they each hit with the force of a charging brineseal. Illaoi kept her guard up over her face, twisting to shrug off the blows.

Without her idol, she could not summon Nagakabouros’s tentacles to throw them back—but she could punch. The Goddess tests even me, she thought. But this is a test I am glad to bear!

She hit a sailor on the shoulder so hard, his arm dislocated with a sound like a plank cracking in half. She kneed another so forcefully that his flying body shattered the stairs leading to the upper deck. She moved through forms of combat she’d learned while training for the priesthood. Fists snap forward, like the strike of a ramming ship. Legs planted, like the roots of an island in the bed of the sea. Whispering a regretful prayer to Nagakabouros, she dodged Kristof’s punch, rolled him over her shoulder, and threw him down on the deck. His forehead left a splatter of red on the boards.

She began backing up toward the hole in the wall. Outside the ship, I’ll have room to fight. “Captain, you’re an embarrassment,” she taunted. “You are everyone’s fool.”

Exactly as she expected, Ruven’s expression curdled with rage.

“You feel weak because you are weak,” she continued. “Nobody’s help can change that.”

He dove at her. Illaoi let the force of his leap carry them both straight out the side of the ship.

They burst into the sunlight locked arm-in-arm. She caught a glimpse of the chaos on the upper deck: Yorick swarmed by attacking sailors, each wreathed by blue light. She saw him swat a woman clear off the ship with the flat of his shovel.

Then she and Ruven sank into the sea. This was her territory—Ruven was strong beyond human strength, but the man could not swim. Illaoi had been training to swim through riptides since childhood. She pinned him to the sand on the bottom of the bay, grabbed him by the neck, and held him down. Then she punched him until she cut her knuckles on his teeth.

Illaoi could hold her breath underwater for nearly five minutes, if she was conserving her energy. Punching Ruven into submission took so much out of her, she only lasted for a minute and a half before she had to kick up to the surface and take a gulp of air.

Ruven was thrashing weakly on the bay floor, kicking up a cloud of sand. Illaoi swam back down, grabbed him by the jacket, and dragged him across the water and onto the shore. “Give in,” she shouted, and struck him again. He coughed up a mouthful of seawater. “Give in! You’re a dead man.”

Ruven’s eyes darted to the ship. She followed his glance and saw Yorick and Bartek grappling at the prow of the boat. Yorick was holding Bartek’s throat, but the spirit’s hand, gripping the orb, was raised to the sky...

The orb flared a blinding white, and pain drove Illaoi to her knees. It was as if someone had driven a lance of fire through the top of her head. By the Goddess, what was that? She hurt too much to move.

Ruven crawled to her on broken limbs, a dagger in his hand. “His master is too powerful, Illaoi,” he said. “We all have people we answer to. He answers to a phantom who’s near like a god. Just... just give him the amulet.”

Illaoi had destroyed that “god” several weeks ago. “No,” was all she could croak.

But the searing light of the orb shone from the boat again, and this time, the pain was worse. Illaoi gritted her teeth. It felt like someone was trying to peel her mind from her body.

“Give in,” Ruven begged her. “He’ll suck your soul out your ear and make you a puppet. Like he did me.”

“I’d like... to see... him try.”

She struggled to raise her arm—and simply gave Ruven a backhanded slap. He was so badly injured that it sent him sprawling.

A moment later, a shadow loomed over Illaoi, and Bartek hurled Yorick to the ground beside her. Yorick seemed dazed, but alive.

With tendrils of Black Mist flickering about him, Bartek leaned down and unhooked the lockbox from Illaoi’s belt. “My prize,” he gurgled.

“Heal me, master,” Ruven begged. “Please... I’m dying.”

Bartek simply gave a flat, scornful cough of a laugh. “No.”

Illaoi knew they had only moments before Bartek left. She turned to Yorick. “Gravekeeper,” she whispered.

Yorick blinked, shook himself and collected his focus. He placed his palm on the sand to push himself up—then drew it back, as if burned. “There’s something down there,” he replied. “The dead. Corpses.”

Ruven had seized the hem of his new master’s robes. “I want to live,” he begged.

He won’t survive this, Illaoi realized. But his crew still could. She glanced at Bartek, then back at Yorick. “Let them out.”

Yorick closed his eyes. “Rise,” he told the bones. “I have work for you!”

Illaoi felt the rumbling before she heard it.

The sand danced. The ash on the slope of the volcano began to slide down toward them in sheets. Bartek looked about, suddenly nervous. Deep below them, in the bedrock beneath the ocean, something cracked.

Then a tide of spirits rose.

From a crevasse growing beneath Yorick’s palm poured a torrent of furious souls. Illaoi could see spirits leaping from the sand all around her, howling with a rage so profound and concentrated that she lost her breath. They stank of sulfur. The air was so thick with their charred, transparent forms, the terrain around her distorted.

Yorick lifted his hand and flung it at Bartek. With a sound like a cracking whip, a lash of Black Mist flew from the cape on his back and struck the Helian scholar. The Mist around him surged and coiled.

“This man is a servant of the Mist,” Yorick shouted. “The Mist that woke you, and trapped you here!”

The spirits surged toward Bartek, drawn like hounds to a scent.

“Kill him,” Yorick commanded.

The geyser of souls struck Bartek, flipped him onto his back, and thumped the sand around him into a crater. The furious dead tore at Bartek’s robes and beat him with their fists. He writhed, screaming; every strike of their sulfurous hands burned him.

Something flashed in his own hand. The lockbox! Illaoi forced her aching body to stand. The sand bubbled and churned as hundreds of spirits erupted from it, and the rushing current of passing souls whipped her hair and buffeted her like a strong wind. She could barely keep her footing.

She pushed forward, stumbling, and grabbed Bartek by the robes. Spirits writhed around her, screaming in their desperate attempt to strike him. Holding on to him was like holding on to a flag in a hurricane. She tugged him closer. “Give me the amulet!”

“It belongs to my master,” Bartek roared.

She struck him in the jaw. She felt something crack. “Your master is dead,” she shouted. “My friends and I killed him!”

But then his jaw writhed back into position on his face. “No,” Bartek snarled, tar spilling over his warped and sagging lips. “He still lives!”

He brandished his orb, but Illaoi grabbed it. Its smooth surface burned her hands, but she ripped it from his grasp just as it released its final flash. The souls around him recoiled, screaming, and Illaoi fell backward.

She caught a glimpse of Bartek launching himself out over the sea. The lockbox was clutched in his slimy fist. He floated there, victorious...

But then the spirits caught up. They overwhelmed Bartek, and the force of their charge pushed him toward the horizon. He shot like a cannonball over the surface of the water—two hissing sheets of spray flew up on either side of his path.

“No,” she heard Yorick shout to the dead. “Wait!”

The spirits ignored him. The ocean boiled with furious souls, and they carried her enemy and her duty away from her. Far out at sea, something detonated, and a tower of spray shot up the height of a ship’s mast. A moment later, there came another, even farther out. The spirits were moving faster than any ship or serpent-steed.

Illaoi dropped Bartek’s orb and fell to her knees. She pressed her forehead to the sand. I’ve failed. He has Viego.

Yorick collapsed beside her. “This is their will, not mine,” he croaked.

“I’ve failed in my duty,” she said. “I’ve failed Sarah.”

“Who?”

Illaoi struggled to sit up. “My dearest friend. I told her—I promised her I would destroy it.” When she needed me most, I failed her. Goddess, forgive me!

Yorick watched as more spirits rushed out to sea. “I’ve uncorked something I cannot control,” he said. “They were locked down there for centuries, beneath the stone. A city of souls. So much pain and fury. They want revenge... and he is a creature of the Black Mist that roused them.”

As the last of the spirits rose from the earth and poured into the ocean, Illaoi could feel their rage dissipating. “What will happen to them?” she asked.

“If they make their way back to the Isles, I will find them,” Yorick said. “But I doubt I will find that toad who took Viego.”

They struggled to their feet and surveyed the battlefield. Bartek’s rule over the ship’s crew had ended. She could see several of the sailors lying still on the beach, and more draped over the railing of the ship. Ruven himself lay nearby, half-buried by a drift of sand. Illaoi felt for a pulse, but could not find one. “He has died,” she told Yorick.

“But his spirit is still here.”

Yorick knelt beside Ruven and placed a hand on his shoulder. Illaoi saw a shade of him rise from the body, shimmering a near-invisible pale blue in the bright morning light.

His voice was faint and echoing, like a person whispering to them from the far end of a pipe. “I’ve died!” he exclaimed, dismayed. “Gods. I’ve died!”

Yorick took the spirit’s hand. “You’re safe,” he said. “You’ve left your body behind.”

Ruven regarded his broken body with uncomprehending shock.

“You can leave it all behind,” Yorick said. “I’ve awoken you so that you can find peace.”

Ruven froze. “Find peace?”

“Is there anything you need to say?” Yorick asked. “Anything you need to do?”

“I’m not going to find peace. Not without the crew,” Ruven said. “I’m their captain. I owe them.” He glanced around. “Where’s that fiend’s artifact?”

Illaoi was dumbfounded. In his moment of death, at last, Ruven thought of his crew. Goddess, Yorick was right. The dead can change.

“I have the artifact,” Illaoi said. “Can you use it?”

“It held my soul,” Ruven said. “I felt how it works. It can’t save me... but it can save them if they haven’t died yet.”

“Help me heal them,” Yorick begged. “Please, show me how.”

Ruven turned to Illaoi. His face was split with a silly grin, the only genuine smile she’d seen on him since they’d met. “Priestess, watch this,” he said. “I’ll show you what I can do.”

Then he gripped Yorick’s hand... and faded away.

Yorick ran down the beach. The sailors on the shore were at the brink of death. He seemed to know whose spirit still stayed with them, and who had already passed. With Ruven’s knowledge guiding him, Yorick moved among the corpses. When the globe shone in his hand, their breath returned.

As Kristof came alive again in a fit of coughing, Illaoi thought, Yorick heals the living and the dead. What does the Goddess think of him?

But she knew the Goddess would not tell her what to think of Yorick. The Goddess needed her to decide for herself.

That evening, after she’d hauled her idol up from the bottom of the bay, Illaoi and Yorick went to bury Ruven and the other dead high up near the lip of the volcano.

“There’s a fantastic view up here,” Yorick remarked, covering the final grave. He wielded his spade like an accomplished craftsman.

Illaoi approached the edge of the volcano and looked down into the black-capped, red-cracked lake of lava below. She wasn’t sure what to feel. “Perhaps their spirits can watch the rest of the world covered in ruination from up here,” she said.

Yorick stood beside her. “I do not think that will happen,” he said. “Even if Viego tries to kill the whole world... well. The dead have their own kind of will.” He glanced at Illaoi. “I’ve met several in my time who would see him destroyed. They can help us.”

Illaoi thought for a moment. The dead, rising up against Viego? She’d seen something like that on the Shadow Isles before. But it was so rare. With Yorick, was another future possible? Spirits and Buhru, aligned with the same goals? It felt impossible. But...

“I will help them,” Yorick promised.

Illaoi felt a strange hope growing inside her. “You have a good heart,” she said. “Your ability is like a promise of Nagakabouros fulfilled, I think. The power to move the dead from stagnation... I have never seen anything like it before.”

Yorick shrugged. “I do what I must.”

“No,” Illaoi insisted. “You do more than anyone expects. You freed Ruven’s spirit. You moved him after his death. And you brought motion to the trapped dead!”

As she spoke the words, she felt the shock of it growing within her. If this is possible, she found herself thinking, then anything is. Motion for my friends. Freedom for Sarah. A better world for all of us.

“Nagakabouros brought us together for a reason,” she continued. “I think we can learn from one another, as the ancients did.” The possibilities blossomed in her mind. The ancient Buhru and the scholars of the Blessed Isles had created such incredible things together. What they lacked was a common purpose, a mission uniting them toward a single goal. “What your Brethren wished for the world, what my faith dreams of—they are the same. Change and growth. Liberation!”

“I do not know if the rest of your religion would agree.” Yorick laughed.

“I will make them,” Illaoi promised.

“I think it is possible. In my youth, our people were close. But for now, I must return to my home. There are spirits there to whom I owe a duty.”

The Maiden, Illaoi thought. “It is your way. Persistence and dedication, as you said. But one day, when you are ready to leave, the Buhru will welcome an honorable monk like you. We will need an ally in the fight against Viego.”

Yorick gazed down at the lava below. “No one has ever called me an honorable monk before,” he mused.