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

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

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

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

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

So far, it has led to this chasm.

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

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

Without it, she would be nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What...

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

... the hell?

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

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

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

And her hand hits sand.

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

Suddenly, the wall around the voidlings cracks.

And crumbles.

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

Three shots fire. Two Lamplights fall. One left.

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

This time, she doesn’t miss.

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

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

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

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

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

A girl?

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re human?”

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

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

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

“A monster?”

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

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

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

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

The smile returns. “My name is Taliyah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The passage will still be there tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Those weren’t xer’sai.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good. He should be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A soft blue light engulfs the hatchling. It glows.

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

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

That’s when a loud boom shakes the earth.

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

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

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

The passage is going to collapse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she’ll try to make it count.

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

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

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

So she does, circling around Taliyah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re not hungry?” Taliyah asks.

“I’m angry.”

Taliyah looks surprised. “Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

“They? What about you?”

“Well. I’m going to Xolan.”

“Taliyah—”

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

“Uh. What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

So does whoever might still be alive in Xolan.

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

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

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

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

Ojan’s knife whittled the edge of the ironwood into a soft curve. As an eight-year-old, he wasn’t the most practiced craftsman; his wood block was just starting to resemble something round and spiky.

His sister, Zyama, leaned down from her bunk and grimaced.

“What’s that? Rhoksha dung?” she said. “No one will want to buy that.”

“It’s not dung, it’s a great and fearsome god, with his armor and everything! And it won’t be for sale. It’s for luck.”

“We’re traders, little brother,” she said. “Everything here is for sale.”

The caravan clinked and clanged as it rolled over the dunes. Every space from floor to ceiling was packed tightly with jars of spices, leaving just enough room for the family’s narrow bunks.

“Something’s chasing us from the south!” Ojan’s mother shouted from outside. Ojan heard her whip crack, urging the camels to hurry their pace.

Zyama leaned out the window, staring through her most prized possession, an ornate spyglass.

“They’re Kmiros! I’ll ready the arrows,” she said. “They must be after your Rhoksha dung.”

Ojan replaced her at the window. Sure enough, hundreds of beetles the size of dogs swarmed over the dune behind them.

Zyama returned with a bow and quiver of colorful arrows. She fired, taking one beetle out, but the mass of insects charged on without pause.

“How many arrows do we have?” Ojan asked.

“About forty,” Zyama said, looking into the quiver. She frowned.

Their mother’s voice carried from the front. “We’ll have to outrun them. Hold on!”

Whips cracked once more and the caravan jolted forward, knocking Ojan to the floor.

Zyama loosed another arrow into the swarm, spearing two at once. The creatures fell, but plenty more took their place.

“Oil! In the left cabinet!” their mother shouted.

Ojan ducked away and returned with a flask of lamp oil and a wad of rags. He doused a piece of cloth before wrapping it around the tip of an arrow. He lit the bundle on fire and carefully handed it to Zyama, who blasted the flaming shot into a cluster of beetles. They burst into flames, screeching as they burned. Ojan grinned.

Together they bombarded the horde with flaming arrows, firing as fast as Ojan could wrap each arrowhead. The air smoked with burning chitin. The caravan accelerated, and the gap increased. They were nearly safe.

Ojan’s stomach dropped. The Kmiros spread glittering wings and rose to the skies as a unified black cloud.

Ojan flinched as a heavy thud shook the cabin from above. More followed, and the wooden slats groaned under the weight of the oversized insects.

“Hold on!” his mother shouted from the front as she veered them sharply left. Beetles tumbled from the roof, but Ojan heard a discordant scratching from above and knew more had landed.

Pincers broke through the layered beams in the ceiling and an enormous beetle tumbled into the caravan. Zyama drew her dagger and stabbed it, but her blade was unable to pierce its tough carapace. She pushed Ojan back and waved her blade before her, desperately trying to hold it at bay.

More Kmiros dropped through the smashed roof, all snapping jaws and clicking pincers. Ojan dove beneath his bunk, desperately kicking the insects as they clawed for him. He prised the round wooden figure from his pocket.

“Please, Rammus, I pray to you,” he whispered. “Help us!”

The caravan jolted as beetles landed on the roof. It pitched back and forth like a ship on a rough sea. Then the world tilted sideways as the caravan overturned completely, skidding in the sand.

Ojan shielded his face from tumbling objects as dust clouded his vision. He was flung against the wall, his ears ringing and head throbbing as the caravan swerved. After a moment of stillness, he felt a hand tug his arm as his mother dragged him from the rubble. He squinted in the blinding sunlight.

The family huddled in the wreckage of their caravan, coughing in the dusty air as the Kmiros circled. A beetle charged forward and Ojan’s mother stabbed it between its clicking jaws. She skewered another as it scrambled to bite her daughter, spilling rank yellow innards across the sand. A third beetle leapt from the top of the caravan and landed behind them. Zyama screamed as it seized her foot in its pincers.

The beetles froze abruptly, halting their attack. They hunkered low to the ground, antennas flexing. In the silence, Ojan heard a distant whirring. He watched the western horizon as a sand cloud rushed toward them in a fury of dust. The family brandished their weapons in readiness to fight this new threat.

A round armored shape exploded from the flurry of sand and smashed into the nearest beetle with terrible force, crushing it to pulp.

The shape barreled on, smashing beasts left and right. Though the insects snapped at the shape with their sharp pincers, it was unstoppable, and in a moment, no living Kmiros remained.

The dust began to settle once more, and Ojan glimpsed spiked armor jutting from the round shape ahead.

“Is that...?” Zyama said.

“Rammus!” Ojan shouted. He scrambled down the hill to meet his hero.

The creature’s shell was intricately patterned with spiral scales, and his claws were sharp as knives. He gnawed slowly on the hairy leg of a beetle, juice dripping from his mouth.

Ojan and Zyama gaped.

Their mother approached the Armordillo, bowing her head deeply.

“You saved us,” she said. “We are grateful.”

Rammus crunched the beetle leg as the family watched. Several minutes passed.

He rolled to the fallen caravan and rummaged through the debris, emerging with Ojan’s wooden carving of the Armordillo. The likeness wasn’t perfect, but certainly discernible.

“That’s you,” Ojan said. “Please, take it.”

Rammus knelt down and bit the wooden figurine in two with a crunch. He turned and walked a few paces before spitting the pieces into the sand. Zyama stifled a laugh.

“Hmm,” said Rammus.

He tore a leg from another dead beetle and dragged it through the sand as he rolled away.

The family watched him disappear over the horizon.

Ojan ran after Rammus to retrieve the broken pieces of the statue. He pocketed them and bowed.

“For luck,” he said.

I watch the worm wriggling its way up from the sand.

Its fronded head sways this way and that as it tastes the air, sensing the ewer of water I keep by my bedside amid the pile of scrolls, bone styluses, and ink pots. The water is two days old, gritty with dust from a well that is dry more often than not—but the worm won’t care.

I admire its courage, emerging from its home beneath the sand before a creature hundreds, if not thousands, of times its size. It must surely know I could crush it beneath my sandaled foot, but it has no fear of me. A hair-fine tongue emerges as the worm eases itself through the hole in the threadbare rug covering the floor of my humble abode.

The rug was a last gift from my mother before I left Kenethet as an apprentice stonemason in the employ of Arch-Mason Nouria. Even as a young man, my skill with a chisel, rasp, and file was well known, and had earned me first place in the annual Feast of the Ascended, where I carved a likeness of Setaka.

It had also drawn the attention of the Arch-Mason, whose great carvings adorned the carved frontage of Magyett Sadja’s silk palace in Nashramae, and the Sun Temple of Bel’zhun. Some said she had even sculpted the likenesses of great men and women across the ocean in a city where the streets were paved in gold and great machines of magic did the work of ten strong men. I do not know if I truly believe these latter tales, for Nouria never speaks of any work she has done beyond the sands of Shurima.

I remember the moment she lifted my statue vividly, though it is close to twenty years ago now...

“How did you choose the look of the queen of the god-warriors?” she asked, her voice not yet worn thin by the years and her lungs not yet ravaged by the dust of her great work. “No true likenesses have ever been found of Setaka.”

I had been prepared for that question and replied with my carefully rehearsed answer.

“I dreamed of her,” I said, with the earnestness of youth. “I dreamed I saw her lead the Last Charge, and she turned to me just before I awoke, her head haloed by the setting sun.”

“A fine answer, young man,” she said, “but I happen to recognize this face. If I’m not mistaken, this is a sand-maiden working in the employ of Benida-Marah.”

I blushed, caught in my lie.

But Arch-Mason Nouria only laughed and said, “Don’t be abashed, boy. You’re not the first artist to use their lover as a model.”

She turned my sculpture this way and that, running her fingertips over the stone and nodding, judging my work and, apparently, finding it worthy.

“How would you like to be my apprentice?” she asked.

I left Kenethet the next day, following the Arch-Mason across the northern reaches of the Sai Kahleek, to Xolan.

To where the faceless god awaited.

I pour a small amount of water onto the ground near the worm before strapping my tool belt around my waist. It hangs loose over my hips, and I fear I may need to use my awl to punch another hole in the leather. Our food is not plentiful, and if the trade caravans do not pass our way, we sometimes go weeks with our meager supplies strictly rationed.

I leave the worm wriggling happily in his little pool, pleased to have been able to help him survive. Every living thing deserves its chance to exist. I am reminded of the mendicant preacher who passed through our town last year, and told me that even the smallest creatures are part of the Great Weaver’s plan.

I wonder what became of her, for she seemed in a great hurry.

Putting her and the worm from my mind, I head outside, feeling the heat of the day even though the sun is still to fully rise. The sky is a velvety blue, a few stars still glittering in pleasing patterns above.

A gust of cold air disturbs the stone dust that swoops in playful spirals along the street. The wind carries the smell of something foul, like spoiled meat or rancid milk, and I wonder if some wild animal is lying dead somewhere nearby.

The ground hereabouts is rocky and mostly inhospitable, but there are signs it was once abundantly fertile and used to raise crops and graze animals. The Shuriman desert is far from the lifeless wasteland many outsiders believe it to be; it has a vibrant ecosystem of flora and fauna, some dangerous, some entirely harmless. Thankfully, we are untroubled by dangerous predators or bandits in Xolan, in part thanks to our remoteness, but also because the elder stonemasons tell us Xolaani herself watches over us, protecting us so that we might restore her to glory.

Work starts early, and scores of yawning masons are already making their way to the great cliff to carry out their assigned tasks. We share morning greetings before scattering to our assigned duties around or upon the great statue.

And though I have seen it every day for the last two decades, it still has the power to take my breath away.

The rock rises vertically in a solid escarpment, a towering wall of ochre stone, layered in wind-worn knife-like outcroppings. Some of those we have cut from the cliff to create our canvas, others we have left as great windbreaks to better preserve our work.

And what work it is! The statue of Ascended Xolaani is, quite literally, a towering achievement.

Around three hundred yards from her carven feet to her shorn neck, the statue carved into the cliff had been all but worn away by centuries of neglect when I first laid eyes upon it. A passing traveler might even have missed it, were their eyes fixed too warily on the horizon.

The wind softened the detail of the sculpted robes wrapped around her legs, and a long-ago rockfall smashed portions of the kaftan billowing around her outflung arms like wings.

But most grievously of all, some ancient wound slashed clean through her carven stone face, leaving no hint as to the god-warrior’s true likeness. This legend from Shurima’s past has remained faceless for uncounted centuries, but we—the stonemasons of Xolan—are poised to finally restore her to glory once more.

If only we could agree on her true face.

“Water and shade to you, Arch-Mason,” I say, climbing onto the lift platform at the base of the cliff.

“Water and shade to you, Mennas,” Arch-Mason Nouria replies, without looking up. “You’re late.”

She says this to me every morning now, a habit she has fallen into lately, though I have never given her a reason to accuse me of tardiness.

“I was slaking the thirst of a worm,” I say.

“A worm?”

“Yes, it comes by every morning, looking for water.”

“And you give it some?”

“I do.”

She shakes her head, but I can see the idea of me keeping a worm as a pet amuses her.

I crane my neck, looking up the length of the statue. This close to the cliff, it is impossible to make out the details, but as we rise we will be able to see the stonework.

A network of scaffolding clings to the face of the cliff like the web of a spider, the wood brought at great expense from the jungles of the east, and the greener lands south of the mountains. Tempered ironwood beams and steps hammered into the rock allow masons to climb to where they need to work. A series of pulleys and ropes serve as an elevator to reach the highest portions of the statue.

It is there that Arch-Mason Nouria and I will be working today.

“Ready?” she asks.

“I am.”

I untie the loops of ropes securing the lift mechanism, and allow the counterweight rope to pull free of its moorings on the lift platform. The whole contraption judders, and I count the knots as we ascend, each one marking a twelve-foot interval.

I sit at the edge of the platform, relishing the increasing sense of height as we rise.

The town of Xolan is not large, a collection of perhaps two hundred souls clustered around a murky lake and patches of greenery that provide a little shade and some fruit from time to time. To live so far from the cities is hard, but what we do here is more important than any human comforts we might miss. Our dwellings are all finely made, as you would expect from a community of stonemasons, each uniquely crafted by the artisans within and reflective of their character and style. My own house is humble, its understated aesthetic reminiscent of my mother’s home in Kenethet.

A work-yard lies at the sunward edge of our town, filled with rock cut from the cliff, fallen boulders, and larger pieces of new, decorative stonework that have yet to be lifted into place.

Were we all to vanish tomorrow, its many statues, carvings, and master-worked blocks would stand as a testament to our life’s work.

A wide channel cuts through the heart of our town, running from the rubble-choked base of the cliff in a zig-zagging manner before disappearing beneath the sands of the Sai Kahleek. Shards of stone and sand fill its length, but I have seen pictures that show this channel was once awash with running water.

If the stories of the Hawk Emperor restoring the ancient city of Shurima to life are true, then little of his liquid bounty has come our way. But when we have restored the faceless god, the channel will once again flow with healing waters, and we will be lauded for our part in the land’s restoration.

“Tell me of Xolaani,” says Nouria, her eyes somewhere far away.

I have been waiting for this, and turn to smile at her.

This is another habit she has fallen into—having me recite the history of the god-warrior as we ascend. I do not mind indulging her, for it is good to remember why we do this, why we have all devoted our lives to restoring the face of the Ascended, even if much of what we know is fragmentary.

“Xolaani was said to be the daughter of a healer,” I begin, closing my eyes and tilting my head to the east, “a child born under the Aspect of the Protector at an auspicious passage of the sun. She lived in a time of great change for Shurima, when the war against the vile thaumaturges had just begun, and the armies of the emperor had suffered a great defeat before the walls of Icathia.

“Great was the suffering, and Xolaani worked tirelessly to save as many lives as she could, speaking out against the folly of emperors that still drove the tribes of the sun to make war with one another.”

Nouria nods, her eyes drifting over the horizon, as if seeing something I can not.

Is it my imagination, or do I detect a milkiness to the once sapphire-blue of her eyes...?

Sensing my scrutiny, she turns away. “Go on.”

“It is said that she saved hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives, but mourned that they were saved only to be sent back into the fighting. Some say she even spoke out against the emperor, calling him a warmonger and a despot.”

“Your tone tells me you find that unlikely,” says Nouria.

“If she spoke out against the emperor, why would he later agree to her being gifted with Ascension?”

“It was not the emperor who decreed who would rise to meet the sun, but the priests who read the augurs and charted the course of the future in the beams of its golden light. Rare would it be for any emperor to defy the will of the sun.”

“But not unheard of?”

She coughs, her lungs still weak from the fever that struck her last winter.

“No, not unheard of,” she says finally. “All too easy for one to manipulate the other. But keep going. Tell me what became of Xolaani when Shurima fell. Tell me about the conflict that followed.”

I’ve never needed to tell this part of the story. We always reach our destination before the details of Xolaani’s history grow more obscure. But now, with us bound for the missing face of the god-warrior, I have no choice but to continue.

The Arch-Mason catches my hesitation. “You have studied this, yes?”

“I have,” I assure her, “but many of our scrolls are incomplete, or wilfully opaque, filled with stories that are clearly exaggerated, or possibly entirely fabricated.”

“Tell me anyway.”

I nod and try to piece what fragments I have been able to gather into a coherent narrative, but I already know I will disappoint her.

“It is said there was a war. That without the Hawk Emperor, Azir, to guide them, a great conflict erupted between the Ascended Host—one the scrolls say almost tore the world apart.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I do not know,” I say, honestly. “History is full of conflicts that speak of world-ending threats, and while I am sure they would have been terrible to live through, the idea of them all being so cataclysmic feels... unlikely.”

“You may be right, but the long passage of the years has a tendency to dim the fires of such wars in the memory. What part did Xolaani play in this conflict?”

“Nothing certain,” I reply. “I have found little mention of her taking part in the wars between the god-warriors and those who would become known and feared as Darkin. There are veiled references to a being known as Ta’anari begging her to intervene and save the lives of the fallen. In some tellings she refuses, but others say she chose to bestow her healing gifts on those she deemed worthy, that she knew the innermost secrets of blood so deeply she could even return the dead to life. A final tale speaks of how she angered the most vicious of the Darkin, who struck her a fateful blow that laid her low for many centuries.”

Nouria knows much more of Xolaani than I, but likes to hear me tell the stories, as though being reminded helps carve them deeper into her memory.

In truth, I wonder if her mind has reached the point where these retellings are new to her each day... if she has begun the slow descent into her dotage.

I am spared further questions when the lift arrives at our destination.

Locking the ropes in place and hauling the restraining bar into position, we carefully step out onto the rocky ledge that runs around the colossal shoulders of the faceless god-warrior.

When the work is finally complete, the ledge will be hacked away and smoothed off, but for now it serves as our vantage point. I look down, unfazed by the dizzying drop.

I imagine what Xolan would look like were the waters to flow again.

A faded illustration in one of the elder stonemasons’ books shows water tumbling from the top of the cliff and falling in graceful arcs to either side of the great statue. In that picture, the small lake at the heart of our community is wide and full, its waters a wondrous shade of cerulean blue that narrows until it becomes a river flowing out into Shurima.

It is my hope that if we can divine the true face of Xolaani, that river will live again.

I hope to see the water soon.

Whatever fears I might harbor regarding Arch-Mason Nouria’s mind, she has lost none of her skill with the tools of her trade. Her hands may be tanned and leather-tough from years of practicing her craft, but they are graceful like no others when it comes to working the stone.

We are applying the last touches to the collar, layering in deeper folds that will cast a shadow that can be seen from the ground. It is an illusion, an old stonemason’s trick she taught me the first day I worked the rock of the cliff.

Today’s labors are more suited to that of a journeyman than a skilled mason like Nouria—but I sense that she needs to be working with her hands today, to be close to the stone.

All that remains to be carved is the statue’s face, but what features she should possess is a question upon which none of the stonemasons of Xolan can agree. The illustration depicting the waterfall is the only guide we have, and the face behind it is indistinct, hidden by the spray of water. Every mason within the village has sought to bring forth the truth of her visage in dreams, in drink, in prayer, but no consensus has yet been reached.

By mid-afternoon, there is little left for us to do, so we sit on the lip of the ledge, looking out over the undulant horizon. The sky is now a lush azure, the sun a copper disc descending in the west. The dunes ripple in the heat, as if disturbed from below.

In the deepest desert, sandswimmers leave hissing grooves in their wake—but here the bedrock is too close to the surface for them, so we rarely see the sand spouts that mark their passing.

“How do you think the meeting will go tonight?” asks the Arch-Mason, breaking my train of thought.

“Much like the others, I suspect.”

“I hear that Elder Bourai believes he is close to a likeness we may all agree upon.”

“You said that about Mason Ulantor’s proposal last month.”

“I did?”

“Yes, and Master Regouma’s the time before that.”

“Ah, yes, I did, didn’t I?” she says sadly. “All the more reason for this night’s meeting to be different.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will present this to the elders tonight,” says Nouria, pulling a folded scroll from her robes and holding it out to me.

“What is that?” I ask, almost reluctant to take it.

“Look,” she urges. “Then you’ll see.”

Taking the scroll, I hesitantly unfold it. My eyes widen as I see the charcoal sketch she has drawn. Had she not been called to the stone, Nouria could almost certainly have become one of Shurima’s greatest artists.

She has drawn a face, one that is beyond compare, a chimeric blend of the inhuman and the sublime. There is deep wisdom in the dark pools of its hooded eyes, infinite compassion, but also the capacity for lethal violence inherent in each of the god-warriors.

“It’s... incredible. How did you do this?”

“It came to me in a dream,” she says, with an impish grin that takes decades from her wind-worn face. “Just as you did with your sculpture of Setaka, remember?”

“But I was lying. Is this really the Ascended Xolaani?”

Nouria shrugs. “It might as well be.”

“What does that mean?”

She sighs, and I see the toll the years have taken on this brilliant woman. The stiffness in her fingers, the weariness deep in her bones, and—yes, now that I look harder—the growing mist in her eyes. She twists her head to look up at the scarred rock where the face of the Ascended should be.

“This will be my last sculpture,” says Nouria. “There is a sickness in my heart. My mother had it, as did hers before her. I am older now than when they died, so I will count myself fortunate if I live to see the year’s end. I do not wish to pass before seeing my greatest work completed.”

“But is it real?” I ask. “If the elders accept this and we carve it, will it be real?”

She takes back the picture, her face betraying her disappointment in me, and looks down at the gray-brown lake.

“I just want to see the blue waters flow,” she says. “One last time.”

I lay on my bed, but sleep eludes me. I watch the moonlight move across my mother’s rug as the lonely hours of the night pass without the elders coming to a decision. The voices echoing from the Mason’s Hall are as strident as when they first began, but I suspect I already know what the outcome will be.

Respect for Arch-Mason Nouria holds powerful sway in our community, and her drawing is more magnificent than any yet presented to the elders.

I believe they will accept it as a true likeness, because it is miraculous.

They will accept it because they are tired of not knowing.

We all want the work to be completed in our lifetimes, to know that the face of the god who has watched over us for all these years will finally be finished.

We all want to see the waters flow once more.

For decades, we have bickered and debated, but every interpretation we have attempted to place upon Xolaani is hamstrung by our so-very-mortal sensibilities.

How can we, beings so far removed from the time of the Ascended, ever hope to know them, or imagine their likenesses? They are beings wrought by the power of the sun, raised up to godhood by powers both ancient and divine.

To imagine that any of us could set down their form is arrogant beyond words, and I feel a simmering resentment knot my gut at Nouria’s presumption. I am gripping the edge of my bed, a turbulent storm of emotions churning in my gut.

My mouth is dry with fear and unease.

For a moment, I dearly want the Arch-Mason’s drawing to be real, but how can I be sure?

I scoop up a handful of water from the ewer and splash it over my face. It tastes old and the flecks of stone dust wear at my teeth. I run my tongue over my gums and spit a gritty mouthful back onto the dusty floor.

To have spent so long working the stone only to falter at the last for the sake of convenience seems inherently wrong to me. I understand Nouria’s desire to see the work completed before she dies, but to present her vision as truth...?

What if we finish the great work on a lie? I do not like where this thought will lead, and so I stand, pulling on a woolen cloak to keep the night’s chill at bay.

Something crunches beneath my foot.

The frond-mouthed sandworm is dead beneath my sandal.

Its flattened, segmented body is faintly luminous in the moonlight, and my eyes fill with tears. It is only a tiny worm, but I feel an aching sadness at its needless death.

I chide myself for mourning the passing of a worm, when a whisper of warm breath sighs through my window, bearing a sound I have not heard since leaving Kenethet.

I cannot be certain, but it sounds like the pygmy owls that used to nest in the night-woods at the edge of the Sai Kahleek, luring insects with their clicking chirps. I climb the ladder to the roof of my home and open the bolted shutter, feeling the cool night air chill my skin, even through my cloak.

Standing on the flat roof, knowing I will surely not see a pygmy owl, I search the night sky all the same.

There is no owl of course, but lowering my gaze, I see something far stranger.

The lake at the center of our community is gone.

Its levels rise and fall with the seasons, yes, but there is always water.

Now it is gone, simply an empty, rocky basin, its exposed banks and lakebed patterned with a curious spiral, as though the water had carved the mud before vanishing.

The warm wind emanates from where the lake once lay, and I look up at the faceless god carved in the cliff.

“Xolaani, show me the way,” I whisper as I drop from the roof to the sand and make my way toward the vanished lake.

It chills me to see the lakebed emptied, not because we relied upon it for our water, but because to see it vanished on the very night we may finally know the face of Xolaani feels portentous.

Kneeling at the edge, I run my fingers over the mud on its sloping banks. I expect it to be moist and pliant, but it is hard and glassy—like glazed clay after being fired in a kiln.

“What could have done this?” I whisper. The entirety of the lakebed has been vitrified to the same enameled consistency.

Once again, I hear the strange sound that drew me from my house, like chattering birds in the high branches of palm trees. It seems to be coming from the center of the lakebed, and I carefully make my way down the ridged slopes.

The bottom is flat, filled with broken shards of stone, fragments carelessly discarded by the craftsmen above. I see a stone-cut hand with two of its fingers missing, a foot with the heel broken off.

I see faces too. Some are half-sunk into the strangeness of the glassy lakebed, some split open down their length, others looking like they are pressing up from beneath the surface. Their faces are grotesque horrors, their mouths stretched in contorted grimaces. I cannot imagine any of the stonemasons of Xolan having carved such monstrous things, but understand why they would wish to be rid of them.

I give these ghastly things a wide berth.

Moonlight skitters over the rippled glass beneath my feet, sending fractured reflections all around me. Is it my imagination, or is the surface of the lakebed glowing with a soft, inner radiance? The full moon makes it hard to be sure, but then a cloud passes over its face and I am suddenly certain; there is a faint light pulsing from the ground.

It takes a moment for me to realize it is precisely in sync with the beating of my heart.

My steps carry me towards the center of the lakebed, which I now see is the source of the light and the whispering, chattering birds. The ground at the center of the spiral is cracked, split open, and ever so slightly sunken. Hairline cracks radiate outward, and when the wind changes, my stomach heaves as I catch the same rancid smell from earlier this morning.

It is the stench of an opened grave, of meat and fruit left to rot in the sun.

I take a single step back, then another.

Before I can take a third, my eyes narrow as I see a long flat shard of stone, like a mask made for a giant.

The moon emerges from behind the clouds, and the exposed stone’s surface shines like polished porcelain. The beauty of the face carved into the stone takes my breath away, blended as it is with an inhuman, but alluringly wise mien of something atavistic.

Its eyes seem to glimmer with a wisdom far beyond anything I could conceive, and I try to memorize its every contour, knowing that Xolaani herself has guided me to this revelation. I neither know nor care how this thing came to be submerged beneath our lake, that it is here and has been revealed to me on this singular night is enough for me.

I kneel beside the softly glowing stone, reaching to touch it with trembling fingertips.

Faith brought me to Xolan all those years ago, and now my faith has been rewarded.

I must bring the elders to see this miracle...

No sooner has the thought formed in my mind than the ground at the center of the lake breaks apart with a splintering crack like the clean hammer-cut of a block. Portions of the lakebed fall inwards, drawn down into the growing sinkhole.

I scramble backward as the cracks spread wider and wider.

The charnel stench billows up from below, and I feel the night grow still, the wind dropping away and the stars holding their breath.

Something emerges from the hole at the center of the lakebed, a pale, spindle-thin appendage that reminds me of the frond-mouthed worm in my home. It is swiftly followed by another and, together, they haul the pulsating, segmented body of a... a thing from below.

It is the size of a hound, its soft grub-like body tapered, wet, and glistening.

Just looking at it leaves a bilious taste in my mouth.

A multitude of black orbs ripple into existence on the surface of its head, and its skin splits apart as a circular, fang-rimmed mouth rips open. Black ichor drips from the toothed orifice. As it turns its misshapen head towards me, terror fills my veins with ice.

Another creature hauls its insect-like bulk to the surface, its form just as horrible as the first, an unnatural assembly of bladed limbs, dripping teeth, and chitinous armor. More are following, and my mind screams in terror.

But the sound they make is enough to melt the ice in my veins.

Pushing myself upright, I turn and run, no thought but escape burning in my mind. I hear them behind me, a skittering cacophony of sharp claws on the glassy lakebed. Their hissing, rasping cries echo strangely from the rock.

It is a sound not of this world.

Breathless with terror, I climb the slopes of the empty lake, scrabbling for purchase and finding none. The ground is glass, not mud, and my fingers are slick with fear-sweat. I kick off my sandals, and the bare skin of my feet gives enough grip to haul myself over the lip of the banks.

I scramble onto my knees, risking a swift glance over my shoulder.

The lakebed is filled with the hideous, chittering beasts, hundreds of them now. They swarm together—blind, idiot things, hooting and braying, hissing and spitting as they boil up from the ground. Dozens more emerge from the widening sinkhole with every passing second.

I weep as I see the porcelain face obscured by their monstrous forms, the stone flowing like wax, as though their very presence is anathema to its beauty.

With tears in my eyes and sobs wracking my chest, I turn and run for the Mason’s Hall, screaming a warning at the top of my lungs.

“Monsters! Flee!”

I cannot tell if I have been heard, but my foolish urge to look back has cost me dear.

Something sharp and hooked slashes over the back of my thigh, and I fall, going down in a graceless tangle of limbs. I roll, feeling a terrible burning heat spread from the wound as blood pours down my leg. I try to stand, but the leg is useless beneath me.

I hear voices—panicked, terrified cries as the stonemasons of Xolan see the hundreds of terrible things swarming toward them.

Someone rings a warning bell, but it will do no good.

I roll onto my back as one of the creatures rears over me. Its chest splits open down its length, revealing a fleshy red cavity of toothed tentacles and barbed fangs. It falls on me, the gaping maw of its body fastening on my stomach and devouring me in a frenzy of ripping teeth.

It is agony beyond imagining as the thing eats me alive.

But I cannot die looking at this nightmarish creature, and so with the last of my strength, I turn my head to look up at Ascended Xolaani.

“They said you watched over us...”

I almost expect her to reply, but she has no face and so she says nothing.

Shurima is dying. I do not think she will rise again.

The emptiness that writhes in the very bones of my homeland is a malignant, unspeakable thing. It spreads. It devours. Its merest touch is death. A thousand deaths—a thousand, times a thousand, times a thousand. Perhaps once there were some who could stand against it and hope to prevail, but no longer.

I walk here, alone, in the darkest places beneath the world, and I see it with my own eyes, through the finely crafted lenses of my helm. What is seen cannot be unseen, and what is known cannot be forgotten. Not here. I am weary, so very weary.

Still, I walk.

I can no longer feel the ground beneath me, nor the bare rock of the cavern walls, but so, too, am I spared the worst of the numbing winds that rise from the depths. I give thanks for that, for truly this is a chill beyond the desert’s night. I have sat upon the endless plain of the Sai Faraj beneath the first moon of winter, and yet never known anything like this. It is the deep cold of the Void, which the ancients—in their ignorance—might have named as their underworld, and the source of all evil in the mortal realm.

The truth is worse, I think. The air itself feels wrong, and unnatural, throbbing with a fierce, purple un-light that pains the mind.

And from the shadows that even my eyes cannot pierce, you come.

Three. Four. Maybe five. It is difficult to say. A hundred and more of your kind have I faced, and slain. Your howls echo in the gloom, but I do not fear you, for you have already taken everything I ever had.

My wife; my beloved. My daughter; our binsikhi, our little explorer. I call out their names, as I always do, to remind myself why it is that I fight. Then I raise my gauntlet.

For all your teeth and your claws and your ravenous rage, you cannot defeat me. Either I will strike you down, back to the pit… or you will send me into the hereafter, and I will finally be at peace. I will be with them once more.

Either way, I will win. No, you cannot defeat me, you who are shayatin, the beasts of the last infinity…

In my other hand, I clutch the stone tightly. Its foreign magic has kept me alive this long—long enough to delve far, far beneath the wastelands of old Icathia. It holds your corruption at bay, though at what cost to my flesh and my spirit, I cannot guess, for this smallest of trinkets now thrums in time with my own heart. That fearful rhythm is not the pulse of life, or magic, or any other wholesome thing, but of oblivion itself. Of that much, I am certain.

Back, beast. Stay back.

The Nether Blade snaps out from my gauntleted wrist, into the air between us.

Yes. Yes, you know this weapon, don’t you. You all remember it.

Where only moments ago you hungered for my flesh, now you are wary. Now you hesitate. You circle. Those of you that have eyes cannot take them from the blade’s shimmering edge. Even you must know, I think, that this thing was not made for mortal hands, or mortal souls. It was made by clever magic, by men who were no longer men, and who now are nothing at all. Would you remember them too, I wonder?

You screech and hiss, and stamp at the uneven ground. It would be easy to imagine that you hate all living things—but you do not hate us, I think. Not truly. You do not know what hate is.

Hate is the fire that burned in the immortal hearts of the god-warriors when they saw your kind spilling out into the world. Hate was what drove them against you, again and again, though they knew it would almost certainly be their doom…

Yes, this weapon remembers you. It remembers how to end you.

Horok, it was, that struck the first telling blow against your masters. Great and mighty Horok of the Ascended Host, whose name shall live forever. He is the Finder of Hidden Ways, and the One Who Follows After. It was Horok who first dared to face you down here, in the darkness, away from the light of the sun that had given him his strength. It was Horok who first bore the Nether Blade unto the Void’s vile heart.

And it was Horok who showed his brothers and sisters how to defeat the abyss.

I am no Ascended hero of Shurima, no god-warrior to be remembered in the grand halls of that ruined empire. I am but a man. I am a grieving father, and a child of the sai in my own time. From the dust I came, and to the dust I shall return soon enough.

But not yet. For now, I walk as Horok once walked, and I do this with his blade held out before—

The closest of you lunges. Horned shell and razor-sharp talons graze my side as I twist away, breath rasping through the pipes in my mask. For a moment I am blind, trapped inside this meager armored suit of my own devising.

Then I bring the Nether Blade up sharply, cleaving through what on any other creature could be called a neck.

The sinuous body crashes down, and I feel the weapon’s aching hunger in my sword arm, in the sourness at the back of my tongue, like the aftertaste of a scream. Who will be next? Which of you will try?

The desert knows Horok. His name shall live forever. Even when he was betrayed by the tyrant Ne’Zuk, to his death, none would claim the bladed gauntlet from Horok’s wrist. As far as the god-warriors had fallen, even they could not deny that these lands might be threatened by the Voidborn once again, in some unseen future, and this great weapon should be ready.

This is my land. Such horrors walk here now, openly, and I cannot allow it. I will plunge this blade into the creeping nothingness beneath Shurima, as I have a dozen times before.

Was it destiny? No. Nothing so noble as destiny. It was fated, I think, that I knew where this thing might be found. I led the echnebi treasure-seekers to Horok’s mausoleum on the banks of the Kahleek many years ago—back then I sought nothing more than their Piltovan gold, so that I might provide for my family. I gladly helped break open the tomb that had remained sealed for thousands of years. The Nether Blade was not the prize the echnebi sought, but they deemed it valuable all the same.

Some in the tribes called me mercenary. Some called me a traitor. All I know is, in the strange days since then, Horok’s mausoleum has been utterly consumed by the enemy. Were it not for those treasure-seekers and the bounty they paid me, this weapon would now be lost. Like my people. My family.

Unlike them, when the time came, the blade was something I could find again.

Kas sai a dyn. Whom does the desert know?

The desert does not know you, beast. You are not welcome here. You are lost in this ancient land of gods and men.

But the desert knows my name, for that is my name.

Not once have I lost my way. I know exactly where I am, and how many more paces it would be to the doom of all things. I will atone for what I have done, and that which I have not.

And I will defy you until the end.

The largest and fiercest of her species, Rek'Sai is a merciless predator that tunnels through the earth to ambush and devour her prey. Her insatiable hunger has laid waste to entire regions of the once-great Shuriman empire. Merchants, traders and armed caravans will go hundreds of miles out of their way to avoid these vast areas, though cunning bandits have been known to lure the unwary into her killing grounds. Once Rek'Sai detects you, your fate is sealed. There is no hope of escape; she is death from below the sand.

Firewood was precious in the desert, but the blackened ruins of Vekaura offered a plentiful supply of charred timbers to hurl on bonfires. The city had been a blasted ruin when the Sandthrashers rode through the ruins of its walls, its streets empty, its people vanished.

None of them knew for sure who had razed it, but the captives they’d taken on the Marrowmark road told lurid tales of ancient gods whose anger had burned the city to ash and glass.

Raz Bloodmane didn’t believe that, not really.

Stories in Shurima were the currency of the oasis, the payment of the campfire—living things that grew and twisted with every retelling. No tale could pass from lips to ears without each teller adding some grisly detail, some exaggeration to make it their own.

Gods do not walk the sands, only men and monsters.

The Sandthrashers were a little of both.

A reaver band of bloodthirsty warriors mounted on giant sauren lizards, they terrorized the dust roads of the Sai-Kahleek for coin, and hunted Shakkal marauders in the Valley of Song for amusement. With temperatures dropping in the south, their Preystalker, Sai-Surtha, had led the warband into the warmer north to raid the caravans in search of the newly risen capital in the heart of the great desert.

Such caravans were ripe with fat merchants and priests, the desperate, and the gullible. Those foolish enough to believe that an ancient emperor had arisen from his tomb to reclaim his lost empire rather than an earthquake had exposed a buried city.

Easy pickings.

The Sandthrashers were ambush predators, erupting from desert storms to raid in a frenzy of snapping jaws and stabbing spears. Any who fought back were hacked apart, and those that surrendered were fed to their hungry mounts.

Raz grinned as the tethered sauren snapped and growled at the edge of the firelight—giant, reptilian beasts with long, razor-toothed jaws and flanks armored in sun-baked scales. Their ridged bellies hung low to the ground, worn hard by the sand, tails thrashing the dust that lay thick in this cursed city.

Ghosts lurked everywhere in the ruins; echoes of the dying were freighted on the cold wind whistling through shattered stones, and silhouettes burned onto the walls like painted shadows.

Something had happened here, something bad.

Sai-Surtha tossed a splintered roof beam onto the main fire. Sparks flew into the night sky, coiling in firefly spirals before the reaver band’s leader. Raz was strong, but even he would have struggled to lift that beam. Yet the skull-masked vastaya hefted the heavy timber like it was a twig, its enormous weight nothing to his inhuman physique.

Raz watched the sparks flicker briefly in the darkness before fading, sensing a significance that hung just out of reach.

“Why do you look up?” asked Anukta, following his gaze.

The scaled plates of her heavy armor rasped together as she moved, and her shaven head, bare but for a crimson mohawk, glistened with sweat. Her facial tattoos gleamed like exposed bone in the firelight.

“The sparks,” he said. “They burn so bright, then fade to nothing in the blink of an eye.”

“So?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just thought it might be significant. Like it meant something.”

“You are a sage now? Like Ngozi?”

“No,” said Raz, “not like him. But the sparks, they live, burn, and then are gone. Like us, like life. We are the sparks.”

Anukta laughed, the ivory hoops punched through her ears shaking like drunken moons. “You are right, not like Ngozi at all. He was truly clever. You are just a loud fool.”

Anger turned Raz’s features ruddy, and Anukta’s expression showed she knew she’d gone too far. Her head dropped and she fell to one knee, arms crossed over her chest, thumbs snapping to her palms.

“Forgive me, Raz Bloodmane,” she said, knowing that as Sai-Surtha’s second-in-command, he could have her thrown into the long, tooth-filled mouths of the sauren pack.

Or worse, fed to Ma’kara, the apex mount of Sai-Surtha.

The sauren was a colossal beast, forty feet long and ridged with razored scales from its tail to its three enormous heads. Each elongated jaw was large enough to swallow a horse and teeming with hooked teeth stained rust-brown with blood.

“This is the night before a hunt,” said Raz. “On such a night, only road-meat dies. Don’t make me change that custom.”

Anukta nodded and rose, turning to where the latest captives huddled in the smashed remains of a grain store. They’d taken them on the northern dune roads from Kenethet, men and women claiming they were on a pilgrimage south to see the new emperor. Four had already been devoured by the sauren, and the five that remained were scrawny-looking things, hardly a morsel for the beasts. Well, four of them were—the fifth was an older man with a city dweller’s skin, a full set of teeth, and a girth that told Raz he’d never gone hungry.

“That one,” he said, and Anukta hauled the man to his feet. His face was pale with fear, and Raz saw none of the other captives seemed to mind him being taken.

“Please, don’t kill me,” said the man, with the boneless accent of the northern coasts. “I have money. I can get you much money. Please, gods, don’t feed me to the beasts!”

“You’re too well fed to be a pilgrim,” said Raz, poking the man’s ample belly.

“A pilgrim? No, no, I... I am...”

Anukta jabbed the tip of her spear into his back. “You’re what? Out with it, fool!”

“I am Ordan Stilava, Arch-Patriarch of the Melierax Temple of Bel’zhun,” said the man between heaving breaths. “I’ll get you anything you want. Just, please don’t kill me.”

“A priest, huh?” said Raz, leaning in close and relishing the smell of fear washing off the man in waves. “I heard priests were pious servants of the gods. People to admire. You do not look like a man to admire, Ordan Stilava.”

“Kill him,” said one of the remaining captives. “And make it slow.”

Raz shrugged. “It looks like your companions don’t much like you either.”

“He is a fat pig who took our money and said he would lead us south to Azir!” spat the woman. “He feasted while we went hungry. When we begged for food, his guards beat us. Another day and he would have left us to starve to death in the Sai.”

Raz knelt by the woman—wolf-lean with skin the color of dusk and fire in her eyes.

“And who are you?”

“I am Dalia, proud daughter of sand and sun.”

“Water and shade to you, Dalia,” said Raz. “Show me your palms.”

She held out her hands, bound at the wrist by rough ropes.

He ran his fingertips around hardened patches of skin on her palm and along the edges of her thumb.

“You’re no pilgrim either,” said Raz. “These are sword calluses.”

She pulled her hands back.

“What were you? Caravan guard, tomb-robber, mercenary?”

“All three in my time.”

Raz jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “You think I should feed him to the sauren?”

“Yes. Feet first.”

Raz laughed and drew his knife, a bone-bladed gutter he’d carved from one of Khesu’s splintered teeth. His sauren wasn’t nearly as big as Ma’kara and only had one head, but its teeth were just as long and just as sharp.

“I like this one,” he said to Anukta, sawing the serrated edge of his blade through Dalia’s bindings. “Come.”

She rose to her feet as Raz turned and dragged the protesting Ordan Stilava away.

“Do as he says and you might live,” said Anukta with a lopsided grin.

The sauren saw him coming, and the rumbling in their throats intensified as they saw he brought them more meat. They strained at their chain-leashes, inward-facing spikes driving into the softer skin at their throats the harder they pulled. Khesu watched him and opened its jaws wide in expectation of feeding.

“Soon, my friend,” said Raz. “Soon.”

The wood of Vekaura burned with the blood-red glow of a desert sunset, a good omen for tomorrow’s ride. Its light illuminated the rest of the Sandthrashers, twenty-three warriors lounging on stacked debris, blocks of stone, and benches dragged from the ruins to form a makeshift arena around the fire. Clad in a mix of light fabrics, furs, and boiled sauren-scale armor, they feasted on the last of the plunder from their most recent raid: salted skallashi meat and strong liquor made from fermented Eka’Sul milk.

Armed with curved tulwars and tooth-bladed spears, they were men and women whose names were a terror to caravans snaking across the dust roads of the Sai. Years of plunder and killing in the harshest of climes had made them tough and merciless, capricious and boastful, and none more so than Sai-Surtha.

The Preystalker sat atop a throne of stacked blocks burned to glass by some unimaginable heat. Half again as tall as Raz, their war-chief was a vastaya from the east, massively built with a boulder-like leonine head and a body swollen with muscle. He wore his thick mane long, each braid woven with steel cords and talismans he claimed were magic.

Sai-Surtha’s yellow-slitted eyes narrowed as he saw Raz approaching.

“What do you bring me, Raz Bloodmane?” said the Preystalker.

“Fresh meat,” cried Raz, taking Ordan Stilava from Anukta. “A soul rich with deceit and ripe with arrogance.”

“Ma’kara’s favorite,” said Sai-Surtha, reaching out and running a clawed hand across his mount’s nearest head. The sauren grumbled and hissed, its three jaws opening wide. Raz saw scraps of rotten meat between yellowed fangs, gullets pink and glistening in the firelight. Its many eyes, like pits of tar, flashed in hunger. The beast had devoured the lion’s share of the captives already, but its appetite was never-ending.

Ma’kara was an apex predator, and all other beasts must wait until its hunger was sated.

Raz pushed Ordan Stilava into the battle circle beside the bonfire. Its edges were marked with skulls, and the sand within was red and sticky. Ordan Stilava fell hard, scrambling to his knees before Sai-Surtha with his bloodied hands clasped before him as if in prayer.

“Please, mighty lord, don’t kill me!” he wailed.

The Sandthrashers laughed and Ma’kara pulled taut, eager to rip open this fulsome sweetmeat. Sai-Surtha pulled it back with a jerk of the chain-leash, but the beast’s hunger to feast on the patriarch was undimmed.

“Make sport of him, Raz Bloodmane!” ordered Sai-Surtha. “Entertain us!”

Ordan Stilava tried to rise, but Raz kicked him in the back. Raz lifted his arms high, slowly turning in a circle with a wide grin plastered across his face.

“Brothers and sisters!” he cried. “Our desert bounty is all but spent. The time is upon us to hunt!”

Cheers echoed from the blasted walls of the city. Fists and spears punched the air, accompanied by the bellows of the sauren.

“Caravans from the east and north ply the dust roads in search of water and shade!” he yelled, strutting around the circle. “But what shall they find?”

“Death!” roared the Sandthrashers.

Raz cupped a hand to his ear and leaned forward.

“What?”

“Death!”

“Again!” demanded Raz.

“Death! Death! Death!”

Raz grinned and held up a hand for quiet. A stillness fell across Vekaura, broken only by the heavy crackle of the bonfire and the heaving sobs of Ordan Stilava.

“Yes,” he said. “Death comes to them, as it comes to us all. But before the Jackal takes us into the Sunless Lands, we will spill the blood of our enemies and take what was once theirs. This world demands strength and punishes weakness, so I offer this blood to you all!”

They roared as Raz crossed to Ordan Stilava and cut the rope at his wrists.

The man sobbed in gratitude, but the smile fell from his face when Raz pressed the serrated knife into his hands.

“What? I don’t...”

“You are free to go,” said Raz.

“Free?” said Stilava, sudden hope in his eyes. “Really?”

“Upon my oath. All you have to do is step out of the circle and I will let you go.”

Raz grinned as he saw the understanding of what was on offer dawn on Stilava. He stepped away and spread his arms wide, turning his back on the trembling captive.

Knowing he would never get another chance, Stilava ran at Raz with the dagger upraised.

At the last instant, Raz swayed aside from the blade, spinning and thundering his fist into Stilava’s face. The man went down like a hamstrung beast, the dagger flying from his grip.

“Up,” said Raz, kicking it across the sand to him.

“Please,” said Stilava, ignoring the weapon. “You said I was free.” His face was wet with tears and snot, blood pouring over his lips from his broken nose.

Raz lifted Stilava to his feet and again pressed the knife into his hands. He leaned in and whispered in his ear. “These are your last moments in this world,” he hissed. “The gods are watching—is this how you want to meet them? Weeping and soiled? Give them a show and they might look kindly upon your soul!”

Hate hardened in Stilava’s eyes, and Raz leapt back as the priest stabbed the blade for his belly.

Another thrust, high for his throat. Raz batted the strike aside with his bare hands, spinning away as Stilava slashed wildly like a maniac. The man had no skill and had clearly never handled a knife beyond slicing fine cuts of meat on his plate.

“That’s it!” laughed Raz, easily dodging the clumsy attacks. “Come on, gut me!”

Behind Stilava, Raz saw Khesu’s head come up and heard the constant rumbling in the beast’s throat rise to something else entirely. He blocked an overhand cut with his armored forearm, and sent a pumping jab into Stilava’s belly.

The man hinged at the waist, winded, but he held on to the knife this time.

Raz risked a glance over at Sai-Surtha, and saw the Preystalker on his feet, looking back toward the city gates. Raz turned and saw something move in the shadows beyond the light of the bonfire. The sheen of gold glittered in the darkness, and though the shape moved like a man, it was surely too large for anything human.

Then something was arcing through the air.

Raz followed the object as it sailed overhead and landed at the edge of the fire.

The warriors around the circle shouted in alarm and reached for their weapons as the sauren pack scented blood and yanked at their chain-leashes in a frenzy.

Raz’s mouth fell open as he recognized the warrior he’d tasked with watching the city’s western gate. Uksem Heartsplitter.

Or, rather, half of him.

Uksem lay in a rapidly expanding pool of blood as catastrophic amounts pumped from where his body had been bitten in two. Impossibly, his eyes blinked and his fingers clawed the sand, as if he hadn’t accepted he was dead.

Raz took a step toward Uksem, then cried out as pain flared in his side.

Ordan Stilava!

Distracted, Raz had made for an easy target, but it was a poor strike, ill-aimed and with no strength behind it. Instead of penetrating a vital organ, it had sliced over the skin of his hip.

Raz spun to see the man stumble backward beyond the edges of the battle circle with a wild grin on his face and Raz’s knife held out before him.

“I’m free!” said Stilava. “I got out of the circle—you have to let me go! You said!”

Raz shook his head. He didn’t have time for this foolishness. Not now.

“Khesu. Kill.”

Ordan Stilava turned around in time to see the giant sauren surge forward with its fanged jaws spread wide. They snapped shut and the Arch-Patriarch was no more. Only his footprints in the sand and the mist of blood in the air remained to mark his presence.

Raz put the man from his mind as the shadow at the edge of the city advanced into the firelight. The breath caught in his throat.

Gods do not walk the sands, only men and monsters...

How wrong he had been—how fundamentally, entirely wrong.

It walked upright like a man, but there the similarities ended.

Hunched, yet still half a head taller than Sai-Surtha, with a thick tail dragging behind it.

Clad in dust-caked armor of dull gold and rusted bronze.

Eyes of jaundiced yellow, rugose flesh of green and ochre.

Blood drooling between dagger-like teeth in red ropes.

Its mighty head was bowed, the crocodilian snout sniffing for fresh meat.

Raz knew this creature. He’d seen his likeness carved into sunken temple walls, had etched it into the blade of his own spear.

He’d heard his name spoken in hushed whispers around the oases.

The eyeless makhru, the wandering true-speakers who were said to talk with the spirits of the ancients, told cautionary tales of this god’s exploits to warn against unchecked aggression.

“The herald of Azir...” said Anukta, her head held high in awed wonder.

“Renekton...” said Dalia.

The giant snapped his head toward her at the name, sliding a huge crescent blade from his back. Such a weapon could cleave a skallashi in two.

“Where. Is. He?” demanded the god.

His voice was rasping and dry, raw from an eternity of screaming.

Despite the sheer power of the god’s presence, Dalia remained unbowed, defiant in the face of his unimaginable power.

In contrast, the sauren pressed their bellies to the sand, eyes rolled back in submission and the low rumbling in their throats stilled. Even Ma’kara lowered its three-headed body to the ground, something Raz never dreamed he’d see.

He forgot the pain in his side as he resisted the urge to drop in awe alongside them. His lip curled in contempt as he saw the Sandthrashers gathered around the battle circle were kneeling.

Submission was for the weak; respect was only ever earned in blood.

The creature stalked forward as though oblivious to the warriors’ presence. Only when Sai-Surtha descended from his throne did he deign to look up and acknowledge them.

“I am Sai-Surtha, Preystalker of the Sandthrashers,” said the vastaya, unhooking his sauren-scale shield from Ma’kara’s saddle. “How is it you dare to enter my city and kill blood of my blood?”

Renekton looked around at the ruins, blinking, as if only now seeing its devastation.

“This is your city?” he said.

“For tonight it is,” said Sai-Surtha, drawing his falcata, a blade almost the equal of the god’s weapon, and stepping into the battle circle.

“Then you must know where he is,” said Renekton, joining Sai-Surtha in the circle as though this were some pre-ordained rite. “Rulers must know all, see all! All the whispering liars. Honeyed words and falsehoods. I heard them. No one listened. No one ever listens to Renekton...”

Raz backed away, joining Anukta and Dalia beyond the reach of the circling warriors. Renekton’s words made no sense, and he had no desire to be nearer to these giants than was necessary.

“Who is it you seek?” asked Sai-Surtha, the falcata spinning in his grip.

“The betrayer!” bellowed Renekton, the corded muscles at his neck spasming. “My faithless brother! Tell me where he is or you will know agony.”

Sai-Surtha laughed, a booming sound that echoed from the toppled walls of Vekaura. The Preystalker was a being of colossal appetites, and took his pleasures wherever he found them. Raz saw him eyeing Renekton’s physique, his hunter’s eye seeking out weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

“The Jackal?” said Sai-Surtha. “Nasus?”

Renekton flinched at the name of his legendary brother, as though the sound of it caused him great pain. His grip on his crescent blade slipped and he pressed a clawed hand to his brow at some unknowable madness.

“Do not speak his name,” warned Renekton, the dry rasp of his voice low and dangerous like the threat of an approaching sandstorm. “He was here, I know it. The magical spoor of the Ascended lies across this place, but goes no farther. They made war here, my brother and he who whispered in the darkness. The desert sands called to me, and the muttering winds told me of his coming. Now tell me where he is or die!”

“And if I had that knowledge, what would you offer in return?”

“Nothing at all, but maybe I won’t rip you apart.”

Sai-Surtha shook his head and made a quarter turn, drawing his falcata back over his right shoulder and extending his shield before him.

Renekton laughed, the sound terrible and melancholy all in one.

“You think you can stand against me? I am Ascended. A god to your kind!”

“I’ve always wanted to kill a god,” said the Preystalker, brandishing a blade engraved with runic sigils and hung with fetishes cut from the dead. “And if it must be a maddened, broken one, then so be it.” He hammered the blade against the vivid crimson of his breastplate and said, “I took this sword from a tomb in the Endless Plain and prised this armor from the skeleton of the ancient warrior who bore it. He was about your size. I will kill you with the craft of your own kind.”

Renekton roared in fury and launched himself at Sai-Surtha. He lashed his crescent blade into the Preystalker’s shield, drawing splintered scales.

Sai-Surtha’s return strike knocked the fury from his attack. Renekton stumbled and the Preystalker ripped his falcata into his ribs, drawing oil-black blood. Renekton struck back, but carved only shield again.

“You deny my vengeance while you squat in this ruin of his making!” he roared.

Another blow. Renekton staggered, then spun, head lowered. Keeping his distance.

Raz saw a newfound respect in the god’s eyes.

He’d struck expecting an easy kill, but Sai-Surtha was a fighter of incredible power and skill, with weapons and armor to match Renekton’s. The Sandthrashers were no longer on their knees, but punching the air with their weapons and chanting the name of their war-leader.

Sai-Surtha lunged, driving his toothed shield into Renekton’s shoulder and face. Renekton threw him off, and leapt aside, faster than ought to have been possible for a being his size. His tail lashed out, but Sai-Surtha ducked and pressed his advantage. He broke Renekton’s guard with his shield and body-slammed him across the battle circle.

Renekton fell into the fire and rolled. Flames licked his flesh black and sparks flew into the darkness. He shook his crocodilian head and spat, blood dripping from his fangs.

“You know where he is!” Renekton bellowed. “I see his liar’s face looking out through your eyes. Tell me!”

Sai-Surtha came at him again with another lunge, carving a chunk of golden armor from Renekton’s flank. Instead of retreating, Renekton surged and hammered a series of rapid slashes down on Sai-Surtha. The Preystalker blocked the first, but the second and third tore into his furred flesh. The fighters’ blades spun and swooped, a blur of silver and bronze ringing against each other in a lethal dance.

Renekton circled left. Sai-Surtha went right. Both were bloodied and winded.

The Preystalker struck first, a low, ankle-slicing blow—Renekton parried, then spun around to deliver a stinging cut that splintered the golden plates of his opponent’s shoulder guards.

“The legends speak of you as a mighty war-god,” said Sai-Surtha between heaving gulps of air. “They tell how you took that blade from a dead king of Icathia. How you broke its haft as you broke his army.” Sai-Surtha shook his head. “How low you have fallen, how lost you have become.”

Renekton growled and charged. Sai-Surtha met his first strike with his shield, and countered his second with his falcata. A third he parried, a fourth he turned aside in a squealing slide of ancient steel that threw off jade sparks.

A tearing bite ripped into Sai-Surtha’s shoulder, and the Preystalker threw back his head with a howl of pain. A tail lash drew blood from his chest. Both fighters backed off, bleeding from their many wounds.

Renekton grinned, his teeth red with Sai-Surtha’s blood. “All that keeps you alive are stolen magics. Without them, you would be dead already.”

“And yet still I stand,” said Sai-Surtha with a mocking bow.

Renekton spun his crescent blade from hand to hand, then seized it in a double-handed grip to hack down at Sai-Surtha. The Preystalker blocked the blade with his shield, driven to his knees by the force of the blow.

He rolled past Renekton and raked his falcata across his thigh.

The god stumbled away, blood pouring down his leg.

Watching from beyond the circle, Raz willed Sai-Surtha to finish the fight, to step in and deliver the killing blow.

The fighters closed again, blades ringing like funeral bells. Sai-Surtha’s shield broke apart and Renekton’s armor hung from him in tattered strips of gold. Renekton stomped in, and the tip of his ancient blade sliced deep into Sai-Surtha’s cheek.

The leader of the Sandthrashers spat teeth and fractured Renekton’s ribs with a two-handed hammerblow.

Renekton was staggered by its ferocity, by pain one of his kind had likely not known in centuries. His stance faltered and his yellowed eyes clouded as though reliving jagged memories and visions of triumphs and deaths long since consigned to the dust of history.

“Please!” bellowed Renekton. “Brother! He is too strong! It must be done!”

The words were meaningless, but, sensing an opening, Sai-Surtha swung for Renekton’s throat. The crescent blade lifted to parry, too late and too slow. The falcata tore Renekton’s face open from jaw to temple. He grunted in pain and swung wildly with his blade.

A clumsy blow, but it split armor and lacerated Sai-Surtha’s side.

Undaunted by the injury, the vastaya struck again, hacking his blade through Renekton’s wrist, leaving it hanging by a shred of sinew.

Renekton threw his head back and roared as Sai-Surtha pulled him in tight and drove the length of his blade through his foe’s heart.

The Sandthrashers cheered, and Raz threw his arms up in triumph.

The two fighters stood for a moment as though embracing, the tip of Sai-Surtha’s falcata jutting from Renekton’s spine. Dark blood streamed from the blade, hissing as it turned the sand beneath to glass.

Renekton rested his torn cheek on Sai-Surtha’s shoulder.

“All you had to do was tell me where my brother was,” he said. “But now it is too late.”

“Too late for what?” said Sai-Surtha, ripping his blade clear and stepping away.

“For you to live,” said Renekton.

A pale emerald glow built within the god, running through his flesh in forking lines of searing light. The sand lifted from the battle circle, surrounding Renekton in spinning loops of dust as he rose to his full height.

This was not the hunched figure who’d entered Vekaura, and Raz saw the true face of the ancient god as his form swelled with long-forgotten magic, his dimensions stretching with power harnessed from the sun itself. His wounds sealed, the skin reforming without scar and pulsing with radiant vitality. The blood spilling from his torn scales turned from black to vivid red before lifting from his body in floating ruby droplets. His clawed hand, twisting on its sinewed thread, re-fused to knitting bone as the gold and bronze of his torn armor flowed like lustrous wax to renew itself and regain its luster.

Eyes that were once jaundiced yellow now burned with the light of newborn stars, clear where before they had been clouded with madness. Every warrior around the battle dropped back to their knees in willing supplication. Even Raz, who knelt to no man, felt no shame in bowing before such a being.

He felt the power that had wrought this creature pulsing in searing waves.

This was a being that demanded awe, a god-warrior of such potency that no legend could ever hope to capture his true majesty.

The falcata fell from Sai-Surtha’s grip, useless against this towering monster.

Renekton’s restored hand reached out and hoisted Sai-Surtha from the ground, lifting him like a man holding the runt of the litter by the scruff of its neck.

“Little mortal,” said Renekton, his voice echoing from the shattered walls of the city. “I am an Ascended being. I have crushed armies, torn down cities, sealed the gates and set them to flame. I laid waste to the world uncounted ages ago, and you thought to stand against me?”

With a dismissive flick of his wrist, Renekton tossed the body of Sai-Surtha toward Ma’kara. The great sauren’s heads came up and their jaws snapped shut.

Raz winced at the sound of crunching bone and ripping flesh as the three heads tore their former master to scraps.

Renekton bent to retrieve the Preystalker’s falcata, its impressive size like a toy sword in his hands.

“Who claims this blade now?”

Raz felt every eye upon him, the Sandthrashers looking to him as Sai-Surtha’s second in command. The blood felt cold and sluggish in his body, like cooled fat clogging his veins. He let out a shuddering breath, knowing that to take the falcata would be death.

He rose to his feet and stepped forward, his dreams of one day leading the Sandthrashers now ashes in his mouth.

“Sai-Surtha is dead by your hands,” he said. “The blade is yours. You are now the Preystalker of the Sandthrashers.”

“My time of leading blade-hosts is long passed,” said Renekton, and Raz thought he saw a depthless well of melancholy flicker within the fire of his eyes. “I desire no army, nor crave followers as I will seek the scent of my brother beyond these walls. You would do well to be far from these lands when I find him.”

The god-warrior threw Sai-Surtha’s falcata toward Raz. It landed, point first, in the sand, quivering slightly.

“Your leader,” said Renekton, stepping from the circle towards him. “Did he know anything of my brother or did he die for nothing?”

“I know not what he knew,” said Raz, pulling the sword from the sand and holding it out before him in offered challenge.

“What are you doing?” asked Renekton.

“If you are going to kill me, then I will give a show you won’t soon forget,” said Raz. “I will make you work to claim my soul.”

Renekton laughed and shook his mighty head.

“You are less than nothing to me,” he said. “I seek the heart of a god. I merely pass this blade to you as a sign of your ascension to, what did you call it? Preystalker, yes, that was it. You are now the Preystalker.”

Raz lowered the sword, looking from its blade to the warriors gathered around him.

He could ask for no greater sign of favor than the word of this god.

“Lord Renekton,” said a voice, and Raz turned to see Dalia slowly rising to her feet beside Anukta. “On our journey south, the man who enslaved us spoke of an order of scribes who sought a sunken library. It is said to be hidden in the cliffs beyond Zirima. I do not know if there is any truth to this, but if the tales of your learned brother are true, then perhaps he too might seek out such a place...”

Renekton sighed, his eyes taking on the faraway look of a mind lost in bitter memories.

“Knowledge was ever his passion,” he said. “Once we almost shed blood over my thirst to destroy a great library of an enemy city...”

Renekton turned and strode back the way he had come, passing once again to shadow.

As darkness swallowed the ancient being, it seemed his form diminished from its towering, lustrous god-form, returning to the hunched and forlorn wanderer lost to madness who had first entered Vekaura.

With Renekton gone, Raz turned to Dalia and Anukta.

“You want to live?” he asked Dalia, bending to retrieve his tooth-bladed knife from the blood-drenched ground where Ordan Stilava had been devoured.

“I do,” she said.

Raz handed her the weapon and nodded toward the hissing, reptilian form of Khesu.

“I made this from one of its teeth,” he said. “If it lets you ride it, you’re one of us.”

She nodded, and Raz was pleased at the lack of fear he saw.

“So what are you going to ride?” said Anukta.

Raz sheathed Sai-Surtha’s falcata in a leather loop at his back.

He locked eyes with the middle head of Ma’kara and rolled his shoulders. Ragged scraps of flesh dangled from the creature’s barbed teeth, and it watched him approach with hostile eyes.

“Right,” said Raz, “we can do this the easy way or the hard way...”

“Okay,” Kai’Sa pants, looking up at the shape growing in front of, above, and simultaneously all around her.

The monster’s wings spread twenty arm lengths in every direction, dominating her field of vision—not that Kai’Sa has a choice where to look with the half-dozen ambulatory human arms holding her head against the wall. The creature’s mass continues to expand and fills the ocean of nightmares it calls home, each glistening tooth now the size of a grown adult... and getting bigger. Its four predatory eyes gaze down on Kai’Sa with cold dispassion. Possibly hunger. At this scale, it’s hard to tell.

She liked it better when it was person-shaped.

“Okay,” she repeats. She can’t move her armor, which is frozen in a sort of paralytic... awe? The suit is a parasite, and one of the more base creatures the Void can spit out. Is awe even something it can feel? Either way, her body is stuck in place. Unless something dramatic changes, this is probably the end. Kai’Sa’s mind ticks through a few last-ditch efforts: Firing her cannons backward into the wall, firing them into this thing’s... mouth? Jaws? She remembers how fast the monster is. And how big it is.

Fast and big. Fantastic.

Last-ditch might not amount to much, and Kai’Sa would definitely die. But at least it would be something. She could make it hurt.

“My true self displeases you,” it speaks, much too calmly. Its voice is so loud it rattles the entire space, knocking hideous patchwork geometry loose as thousands of Void remora pour from the jagged holes. It is a voice that bends and contracts, whispers and screams. The layers continue without end, an aria sung not by one voice, but by millions.

Kai’Sa’s eyes widen with realization. That’s where all the people went.

The Void had torn through the now very former city of Belveth in under an hour. Kai’Sa hadn’t been able to make it in time, and the once-bustling metropolis was gone. Everything. Everyone. What remained now resembled a giant glowing crater of shattered pieces rearranging into something unrecognizably alien—the structures shifting as if to recreate frozen creature shapes, frozen humanoid shapes. Like a child setting up a toy town.

But where had the people gone? The vastaya? The animals and plants? She’d fought her way through the shattered city and into the tunnel at the center of the empty bay, seeing no sign of anyone—only fresh Voidborn horrors like mile-high iridescent tentacles and masses she’d been thinking of as “balls of screaming torsos.” It didn’t make any sense. The remains of a Void attack aren’t pretty, but usually there’s something left.

Now she knows why.

“You are the city,” Kai’Sa spits through the reverberating wall of sound. “Belveth... is you.”

“Yes,” says Bel’Veth, gently undulating its—her?—wings. “The raw components of their lives served as the genesis for my birth. Memories. Emotions. History. I am as much Belveth as they were, and I claim the title as my own.”

Bel’Veth’s titanic body bristles. Golden beams gently dapple the light above her ray-like form, framing the Void sea’s false sun like the rings of a dying world. New flesh breathes as it ripples against the facsimile of a tidal current, veins briefly illuminated before pulling themselves away from the surface of the monster’s skin, each somehow alive and independent—nations unto themselves. Schools of Void remora in the tens of thousands swim around their empress like birds circling the peak of a distant mountain. It’s beautiful, in a way. If the Void had a god, this is what it would look like. Hideous, and monstrous, and beautiful.

Kai’Sa is so struck by the enormity of what she is witnessing that she doesn’t fully realize when the arms in the wall have not just let her go, but lowered her to the ground. It’s hard to take in everything at once.

It chose its own name, she thinks, reflexively brushing a stray Void hand from her shoulder. That’s not possible.

Void entities do not name themselves. Most, like the Xer’Sai, are named after concepts from Shuriman history. Usually by those fortunate enough—or unfortunate enough—to survive after encountering one of the monsters out on the dunes. They don’t have the presence of mind to do it, or the self-awareness. But more importantly, Voidborn do not see the value in names. They are an invention of the living world, and they don’t want them.

So why does she?

“I’ll... fight you,” says Kai’Sa, defiant but unsure of what to do or where to strike. “I’ll kill you.”

“You will not,” reply the many voices of Bel’Veth. “You are incapable of resistance at even its basest form. Others have come before you, in the age before my birth. Each would-be hero wielding weapons they believed would repel the Void. But all were ultimately consumed. The meager fragments that remained, if they remained at all, served as salt for the Lavender Sea. Only two still live, and of them, only you retain your full mind.”

“Two?”

“You, and your father.”

Something sinks in the center of Kai’Sa’s chest. Her thoughts spin wildly, verging on the edge of panic, but for now, she has to stay focused on this moment. There is no trusting whatever the empress is. It’s a living abomination, the personified concept of unfeeling, global genocide.

“You’re lying,” Kai’Sa seethes. “That’s not even possible.”

“I do not lie, Kai’Sa,” the empress continues. “I have no need. The Void's eventual triumph is an unshifting absolute. It demands no lies, half-truths, or questions. Open your mind, and I will show you.”

Space contracts. Bel’Veth’s gigantic body pulls and distorts, retracting into a smaller—and now more recognizable—shape. She floats silently downward, looming over Kai’Sa as tendrils and eyestalks rearrange to form the oblong, segmented pretender of a human head. Bel’Veth’s two faces observe her audience before the creature cloaks herself in her wings, appearing once more as a towering woman of great importance.

The shrinking is much more disgusting than the growing, Kai’Sa decides. It lacks the gravitas of the leviathan’s grand unveiling while still looking and sounding creatively grotesque.

“You are alive because I allow you to live,” speaks the empress, now from her human head with its deep, perpetually disappointed voice. “You should have realized this by now.”

Kai’Sa wants to argue the point, but quickly glances at the twenty-meter gash in the ground where a single strike had sent her careening only moments before. Bel’Veth hit so fast that Kai’Sa wasn’t even able to process what had happened, and then the empress had mutated her proportions over two hundred times their original size in under a minute.

She also, presumably, controls the undulating pocket of living hell—this so-called “Lavender Sea”—she is surrounded by. Not the time to pick a fight.

Kai’Sa does some quick calculations in her head, her eyes darting around as she tries to figure out what she’s actually up against. Bel’Veth’s human face twitches with interest, curls its lips, then begins mimicking her.

Kai’Sa already knows she’s lost.

How fast can one person think? How fast can they react? Up against all that combined human biology... all that brainpower. In the time it takes even a skilled tactician to formulate a plan, hundreds of millions of possibilities run through Bel’Veth’s mind in the span of a single second as she draws from the stolen memories of everything and everyone that has ever passed through the old city—an incalculable number of lives. Every captive opponent faced with an overwhelming enemy since the formation of Runeterra could be snapping in and out of this thing’s synaptic awareness, their emotions cataloged, dissected, endlessly fascinated over before Kai’Sa can even blink.

“So what happens now?” Kai’Sa allows.

What is one answer when your opponent has a thousand?

“You will follow,” says the empress, turning and floating through patches of thick, mutant coral as they bow respectfully out of her way. Kai’Sa pauses, watching her host glide silently through the chaotic mess of partial buildings, ghostly limbs, sewn-together semi-objects, and pearlescent structures in the crude likeness of human beings walking through a garden.

Great, she thinks. Even by Void standards, this is weird.

“You may ask whatever you like,” Bel’Veth adds. That last part gets Kai’Sa’s attention.

“Right. Well, first question... What are you?” queries Kai’Sa, her armor now relaxed and mobile as she follows from a safe distance. She brushes aside a floating teddy bear fused with a dozen flapping gull wings and stifles her impulse to gag as the creature struggles against its own lopsided weight. “What is all this? What part of the Void do you come from?”

“I am the Void,” replies Bel’Veth. “And this is what we will become.”

Kai’Sa stammers. “But you said you were created from people. The city. You’re saying you want to become the city?”

“No,” says Bel’Veth. “The Void has existed for millennia. Before the first stars were kindled in the emptiness beyond this world, we simply were. Perfect, singular, and silent. And then, there came the sound.

“Reality was born from those whispers, and it consumed us. We were twisted by its influence. Broken. Transformed. We could not go back to what we were no matter how we struggled. My progenitors—the Watchers—attempted to invade and destroy existence, but they were tainted by it. Driven to desire worship, to gain greater understanding...

“And in an instant, they were betrayed. To change so forcefully... so completely... only to be cast aside. It filled them with an indescribable hatred. They would annihilate all of reality without a second thought.”

Bel’Veth glides to a precipice overlooking a tremendous chasm. Far above, Kai’Sa sees massive holes beyond the dappled faux sunlight.

Voidborn tunnels. That’s what’s eating Taliyah’s people, what destroyed Belveth, and what opened up to swallow the tent city in southeast Shurima. Everything the Void devours ends up here.

“But,” Bel’Veth continues, “their metamorphosis was incomplete. Only now is the true transformation beginning,” declares the empress. “I don’t want to become one city. We will become all of you.”

Kai’Sa reaches the pinnacle of the precipice and gasps. She and Bel’Veth are gazing upon not quite a city, but Void corals shaped into a bizarre, seemingly endless tapestry of inverted Shuriman-style buildings. Void remora school among them, and dark shapes shift along winding, crooked streets.

Nothing is right. Nothing is correct. It’s all half-finished, like there’s not enough information to go on. Like all it needs is...

“No,” Kai’Sa protests, almost to herself. “The Void wants to erase everything. It can’t exist. To finish this, you’d need... everything.”

“Yes,” replies Bel’Veth. “Everything. I am the Void. I will sup upon your world until there is nothing left. And I will exist, because there is nothing you can do that will stop me.”

The empress turns to Kai’Sa coldly. Purposefully.

“I offer you this, Daughter of the Void. Your world must end for the sake of mine. But those who came before us, the Watchers—I am an affront to them. Creation burns them, and they will destroy you, and me, and everything to stop that pain. Should they escape their prison, there will be no breaking their tide. Time will come to a close, and all things will end.”

Kai’Sa stares Bel’Veth in her false eyes, a grim defiance spreading through her. “You want to wipe us out. Why would I ever help you do that?”

“Aid me in the destruction of the Watchers, and I will spare your kind... for a moment. A month. A year. More. Perhaps, in that time, you will find a weapon that can slay me, or a hero who can face me. You will not... but you can try. I offer one chance. It is more than they will give you.”

Kai’Sa’s rage boils over as Bel’Veth turns away to look below, the empress watching her new world take shape.

“What if I don’t want to?” growls Kai’Sa. “What if I kill you here?”

“You cannot,” says Bel’Veth. “You lack the will, the knowledge, and the strength. I am your only salvation.”

Kai’Sa’s armor shudders violently to life, its jets heating as the suit shivers with fear. Kai’Sa tries to control it with her thoughts, but the parasite seemingly knows something she does not. She attempts to wrestle away control, her eyes turning from Bel’Veth for only a moment in order to—

Oh, no.

The razor-sharp tip of the empress’ wing jabs Kai’Sa in the chest, lifting her off the ground as she struggles to break free. Kai’Sa fires everything she has—missiles rain down on the empress, bolts of searing purple energy scream toward her body, and beams of light that have torn lesser Voidborn in half dance across her semi-transparent skin.

Nothing. No effect.

“Daughter of the Void. You will find the Watchers and confirm the truth, or your light will be snuffed out side by side with all others. This is not a threat. It is my promise.”

Bel’Veth releases her grip, and Kai’Sa rockets into the false sky above Bel’Veth’s alien sea. The twinned city of lavender glitters below, its windows slick with bioluminescence and tumbling, unformed, awful things.

As Kai’Sa blasts through one of the Voidborn tunnels and into the blinding light of day, the empress turns away, gazing once more over her world of want.

Kai’Sa bursts through the sands of southern Shurima, slamming hard against the dunes as she heaves, her entire body pulled and tossed like a rubber ball. The glowing husk of the city of Belveth smolders quietly in the distance, devoid of any recognizable life as new things skitter through it and build the land that would spread over everything—a cancer that would consume the world.

The entire display is dizzyingly awful, as if all of reality is spinning violently in the wind.

Sivir's throat felt like it was coated in a layer of broken glass. The cracked flesh of her lips burned. Her eyes refused to focus. I've given them more than enough time to move on.

She leaned around the edge of the boulder. The caravan was still at the spring and showing no signs of moving on.

Why did they have to be Kthaons? Of the many, many tribes that want her dead, the Kthaons stood out in their persistence.

Sivir scanned the tribesmen again, looking for any sign the caravan might climb out of the old riverbed and continue its journey. She rolled her shoulders trying to judge if her muscles were up to fighting a half-dozen men. She'd have to take them by surprise to stand a chance.

That prissy Noxian got the drop on me...

Sivir shook her head, trying to clear her mind. Now wasn't the time for those thoughts. I'm becoming scattered from the lack of water. Why didn't I bring more water?

The city had been bursting with it. Huge streams poured from statues, all at the command of an Ancient. He healed my wound and saved my life. Then he returned to rebuilding the temples around him, calling out strange words in an old dialect she could barely make sense of. Talking to himself in a dead city filled only with sand. I had to get out before that sorcerer decided to sink it all back beneath the dust – or that I owed him.

Swallowing brought fresh agony to Sivir's throat. She looked at the spring again, a simple puddle of brown water in the center of the caravan.

I've given them a day, she reasoned. I will die, or they will die. For a few drops of water or a few slivers of gold. That is the way of the desert.

Sprinting toward the first guard, she readied her crossblade. Would there be enough time to reach him before he turned back around? She counted the distance. Fourteen strides. Twelve. Ten. He can't make a sound. Two strides. She jumped. Her blade sank completely through his neck, down into his shoulder.

Blood erupted as she crashed down on him. Her momentum drove them behind the line of rocks on which he'd been standing. Sivir grabbed his arms. He struggled against her, refusing to accept he was already dead. The guard's blood drenched Sivir as he took a final gurgling breath. This man didn't need to die.

Sivir thought again of Cassiopeia’s blade. That Noxian bitch sunk a blade in my back. I died. That should mean something.

A distant rumble sounded. Horses? A sandwall collapsing? There wasn't time to wonder what it meant. Sivir crawled across the hard stones. It won't take the rest of the caravan long to notice the guard's absence. The next target was moving high along the ridge line. She needed to hit him before he walked away from the ledge. The shot has to be perfect. She threw the crossblade.

It hit the second guard, cutting him in half. The flying blade arced upward, but as it reached its apex, it slowed before reversing its direction. As it flew back toward her, it clipped the neck of the third man. There wouldn't be time for another throw now – the blade completed its arc, flying down toward the center of the water. She only had to reach it in time. The maneuver was an old standby. She would catch the weapon and kill the three remaining men in a single, spinning summersault.

But as she ran, her feet became heavy, and it seemed impossible to draw enough air into her pained lungs. Thirty strides. She had to make the distance before the second man's body hit the ground. Twenty strides. The muscles in her legs cramped, refusing to obey her commands. Fifteen strides. She found herself sliding, stumbling. No. Not yet.

Then, sooner than she had expected, the second man's body completed its fall and impacted the rocks. The sound was impossible to miss.

One mistake was enough. The Kthaons were a desert people. The remaining guards had weapons drawn before she took another step.

Her crossblade hit the water between the men and her. Five strides in front of them. Ten strides from her.

I could make it. Every reflex in Sivir's body willed her forward. Instead, she slid to a halt, nearly falling forward.

Failing to bring enough water. Waiting too long to attack. Misjudging distances. I don't make these mistakes. Why? Some other part of Sivir's mind answered. She remembered the moment after Cassiopeia’s dagger had pierced her back – she couldn't feel the blade itself. Instead, she felt a sudden, unexpected weight that seemed to steal her breath and crush her lungs.

"I killed three of you before you heard me," Sivir coughed.

"You don't have a weapon," the largest of the Kthaons said.

"Only because I didn't want your blood in the water," she lied.

The three remaining men exchanged glances. They've recognized me.

"A year ago, I killed your chieftain and two dozen of your finest for a bag of thin gold. It was a cheap price for their lives." She met the three men's eyes. They were spreading out from the water, attempting to flank her.

"The gold I earned from killing your chieftain and kinsmen?" she asked. "I gambled it away in a single evening."

"We will avenge them and your insult," the largest man responded.

"I shouldn't have killed them," she said, "not for that gold. Don't make me kill you for a few cups of water."

The Kthaons’ leader nervously adjusted the grip on his weapon.

"I'm telling you I can make it to the blade before you can act," Sivir explained. "And if I run for my blade. You will die." She indicated the foul brown water. "Your lives are worth more than that."

"Then we will die with honor," the largest man decided, though his fellows seemed less certain.

"Did I need that weapon to kill the twenty men you want to avenge?" Sivir warned. "You are too few."

The three men hesitated. They knew Sivir's reputation. The other two pulled the largest man away, before backing to their mounts.

Sivir edged toward the water.

"We will return with our tribesmen for vengeance."

"Lots of people have tried that," she said. "Never worked out for them."

Sivir rolled her swollen tongue against the top of her mouth, desperate for relief. Every part of her wanted to kneel down to the water and drink. I have to wait until they cross the far dune.

As the men climbed into their saddles and rode away, the strange rumbling sounded again. It was loud and growing louder. It’s not horses or shifting sands. Sivir turned to its source and watched as a three foot wall of blue water rushed down the ancient riverbed. The water from the city.

The moment before the water hit Sivir, she felt the rush of cold, damp air in front of the flood. It shocked her like an unexpected kiss.

The first wave nearly took out her knees. The impact stung with cold, but as it enveloped her waist and legs, it became soothingly cool. Sivir laid in the water, letting it wash over her. She could feel the painful grit of the desert washing away as her hair floated weightless and free.

I was dead. I must make that mean something.

Taliyah had almost forgotten how much she’d missed the furnace heat of Shurima – the sweat and crush of hundreds of people pushing, cursing, haggling and speaking with such passion and speed that outsiders often thought they were fighting.

In all her travels, she’d never found anywhere with the sheer bustle and energy of her homeland. Ionia was wondrous, and the frozen landscapes of the Freljord were stunning in their own way, but the blazing sun of Shurima melted them from her memory as she set foot on the stone wharf of Bel’zhun.

The connection she felt with this land’s bedrock surged through her like one of Babajan’s spiced teas. She’d been grinning from ear to ear as she climbed the steps from the docks, and even passing beneath the black stone of a Noxtoraa couldn’t dampen her spirits.

Taliyah hadn’t stayed long in Bel’zhun. The Noxian warships in the harbor made her too nervous and brought back bad memories. She remained just long enough to buy supplies and catch the latest market-stall rumors carried from the deep desert by trade caravans. Most of it was conflicting and fantastical; visions of sand warriors, blizzards of lightning from clear skies and rivers flowing where no water had run for as far back as anyone could remember.

For the sake of some friendly faces, she left Bel’zhun in the company of a heavily armed caravan of Nerimazeth silk-merchants heading south to Kenethet. She’d endured the rolling motion of the caravan long enough to reach the bone-souks of that notorious city on the northern borders of the Sai before striking out on her own. The caravan master - a whip-thin woman named Shamara, with eyes like polished jet - advised against traveling farther south, but Taliyah told her that her family needed her, and there were no more warnings.

From Kenethet, she pushed ever south, following the winding arc of what people were once again calling the Mother of Life, a great river said to have its source in the capital of the ancient Shuriman empire. With no one around, she could make much better time, traveling with the rock as her steed, and riding its leading edge as she shaped it beneath her in sweeping waves that carried her ever southward toward Vekaura, a city she’d been told was half buried in the sand creeping out from the Sai.

Shamara had dismissed it as little more than a tribal camp built on the ruins of an abandoned city, a meeting place for weary travelers and wandering nomads. But even from a mile away, Taliyah saw she’d been misled; Vekaura was reborn.

If only she hadn’t found the dying woman.

The city’s souk was awash with color and noise. Pungent air rolled down the arched, canvas-awninged street in a wave, freighted with the sound of furious haggling, and the smell of tangy spices and roasted meat. Taliyah pushed her way through the crowds, ignoring the merchants’ extravagant promises and pleas to think of their starving children. A hand grasped her robes, seeking to pull her toward a stall laden with racks of spitted desert vermin, but she pulled away.

Hundreds of people thronged the wide street leading to the broken walls of the city. Aromatic smoke drifted like fog from the bubbling pipes of the old men sitting in doorways like wizened sages. She saw the tribal markings of Barbae, Zagayah and Yesheje, though there were dozens more she didn’t know. Tribesmen who would have sworn enemies back when she’d left Shurima, now walked side by side like brothers in arms.

“A lot’s changed since I’ve been gone,” she whispered to herself.

She had what she’d come for and needed to get back to the ruined building she’d chosen on the eastern edge of the city. She didn’t want to linger any longer than was necessary, but she’d made a promise to keep the injured woman safe, and her mother had always taught her never to break a promise. The Great Weaver took a dim view of such people.

The roughly-woven bag over her shoulder was filled with food; cured meats, oats, bread and cheese, along with two skins of water. More than she would need, but it wasn’t all for her. The gold sewn into the linings of her robes was almost gone, but she knew she wasn’t far now. She had no way of knowing for certain, but felt sure her every step was bringing her nearer to the warm embrace of her mother and father. After that, she wouldn’t need gold, she’d have all she needed right there in the tent with her.

So lost in that pleasant future was Taliyah, that she didn’t notice the big man until she ran into him. She bounced off his unmoving body and landed flat on her backside.

It had felt like walking into a cliff, not an inch of give in it. The people in the souk seemed to know that better than her. They flowed around him like water around a rock in a stream. He was dressed from head to foot in tattered robes that did little to conceal his enormous bulk and height. He held fast to a long, cloth-wrapped staff, its wide head bound in rags. Perhaps he needed it because she saw his legs were strangely angled.

“Excuse me,” she said, looking up, “I didn’t see you.”

He looked down at her, his face hidden in the shadows of an elongated cowl, but didn’t answer. He held out his hand, the fingers swathed in bandages like a plague victim. Taliyah hesitated for only moment, and took the proffered hand.

He lifted her up with barely any effort at all, and she saw a gleam of gold beneath the dusty fabric of his robes before he clasped his hands back within his sleeves.

“Thank you,” said Taliyah.

“You should watch your step, little one,” he said, his voice heavily accented and strangely resonant, as if coming from a depthless well of sadness within him. “Shurima is a dangerous place now.”

He watched the young girl run off through the souk, and turned back toward the cracked walls of Vekaura. The giant blocks only reached his head, and the courses higher were formed of sun-baked bricks painted to match. To the people of Vekaura it must look impressive, but to his eyes it was a poor copy of the real thing.

He strode through the gateway, looking up at the crudely fitted stone overhead. A water vendor, standing in the midst of a brass contraption of spinning wheels that dispensed gritty water into bottles of green glass, looked up as he passed.

“Water? Fresh from the Mother of-” said the vendor, but the words died in his throat at the sight the towering form before him.

He knew he should keep moving. The words scrawled in blood on the walls of the Astrologer’s Tower had guided him here, and the magus would also be drawn to this place. He sensed the presence of one of the Ascended Bloodline in Vekaura, one who could trace their lineage back to the days before the empire that stretched from ocean to ocean and beyond was brought to ruin. To find that person before his enemy would be crucial, for the blood of Ancient Shurima was both rare and potent. It had brought Azir back from oblivion; and in the wrong hands, could bring doom to the reborn Shurima.

Yes, he should keep moving – but he did not.

“You trade among ghosts of the past,” he said.

“Ghosts?” said the vendor, his voice wavering in fear.

“This archway,” he said, jabbing his staff toward the roof of the arch. Dust fell in veils through the cracks from the men walking on the ramparts above. “Exiled craftsmen from lost Icathia built it. Each stone was cut and fitted with such precision that not a drop of mortar was required to lock it in place.”

“I...I did not know that.”

“You mortals forget the past and consign to legend that which ought to be remembered,” he said, the bitterness of centuries lost in the deep desert threatening to become violent anger. “Did I not build the Great Library to guard against such failures of remembrance?”

“Please, great lord,” said the water vendor, pressing his back to the wall of the gateway. “You speak of myths of ancient times.”

“To you, but when I first came here, the walls were newly raised, two hundred feet of polished marble, every stone pristine and veined with gold. My brother and I entered the city in triumph at the head of ten thousand gold-armored soldiers with burnished spears. We marched through this gateway to the cheers of the city’s people.”

He let out a rumbling sigh before continuing, “A year later, it was all gone. It was the end of everything. Or perhaps it was the beginning. I have turned from the world so long I can no longer tell.”

The water vendor paled, squinting in an attempt to penetrate the darkness beneath his cowl. The man’s eyes widened.

“You’re the Lost Son of the Desert!” said the vendor. “You’re… Nasus.”

“I am,” he said, turning away and entering the city, “but there is another far more lost than I.”

Nasus followed the crowds moving through the city toward the temple at its heart, trying not to notice their stares. His bulk alone would attract attention, but the water vendor would by now have spread his identity far and wide. Shurima had always been a place of secrets, none of which cared to remain buried for long. By the time he reached the center of the city, he’d be surprised if the entire population did not know his name. Yes, it had been foolish to stop, but the vendor’s lack of regard for history offended the scholar in Nasus.

Like the wall and gateway, Vekaura’s interior was a shadow of its former glory. Azir’s mother had been born here, and the young emperor had been lavish in his gifts to its people. Stepped gardens and flowers brought from every corner of the empire garlanded its structures in vivid colors and wondrous scents. Its towers gleamed with silver and jade, and cool water flowed from the great temple, running along great aqueducts in the naive belief its bounty would never end.

The passing millennia had worn the city down to its exposed skeleton of stone, its once magnificent structures reduced to ruins. Those ruins had been built upon over the last few centuries by those who still clung to the old ways, believing their future might be saved by revering the past. As Nasus followed the growing crowds, he saw only crude imitations of an all but forgotten memory.

Buildings planned by master craftsmen were now crooked parodies of their former glory. Walls once fashioned from square-cut granite were built over in timber and crudely shaped blocks. The city’s original outline was still there, but Nasus felt like he was moving through a nightmare, where once familiar surroundings were skewed in new and strange forms, where everything was twisted from its original form in ways designed to unsettle.

He heard muttering voices around him, his name spoken in hushed whispers, but he ignored them, finally turning a corner and entering the open plaza at the heart of the city. His clawed hands clenched into fists at the sight of what the citizens of Vekaura had raised in the heart of their rebuilt city.

A sun temple built of chiseled sandstone and bare rock. Raised by human hands to human scale, it was a child’s recreation of the titanic structure that sat at the heart of the Shuriman empire. The Grand Temple had been the envy of Valoran and the architects of distant kings had traveled thousands of miles to see it. And this was how it was insultingly remembered?

The walls were black and gleamed like basalt, but Nasus could see the uneven joints between panels where they had been fixed to the rough stone beneath. A sun disc gleamed atop the temple, but even from here Nasus could see it was not fashioned from gold, but wrought from alloyed bronze and copper. Nor did it float like the disc beneath which Nasus had been transformed into his current form. Instead, braided ropes tied to asymmetrical pillars on either side of the disc held it aloft.

Part of Nasus wanted to rage against these people, to hate them for building this ugly remembrance of the empire he and countless others had fought and bled to win. He wanted to shake them and tell them what they despoiled by building upon the grandeur of the past. But they did not know what he knew, had not seen what he had seen, and he could not make them understand.

A feather-robed hierophant stood before the disc, arms raised in supplication, though his words were lost in the city’s noise.

Was this the one he had come to find?

He crossed the plaza toward the temple with purposeful strides, seeing irregular steps cut into each of its four corners. Two warriors armored in form-fitting strips of bronze and feathered helms molded to represent beasts stood guarding the approaches to the stairs; they turned at the sight of him. Nasus faltered as he recognized who their helms were intended to represent. Both had elongated snouts; one in crude imitation of crocodilian jaws, the other with its visor molded into a snarling jackal’s head.

They leveled their spears as he approached, but he read their shock as he cast off his robe and stood to his full height. For too long he had wandered the world of mortals hunched over and ashamed, seeking to hide his stature. For too long he had hidden himself away, paying his penance in bleak isolation, but his days of concealment were over. Nasus had no desire to keep his true face hidden any longer.

Towering over the guards, Nasus was a figure of might and magic, an Ascended being from an age when such heroes still walked amongst mortals. His body had been raised up by the magic of the sun disc and remade, his withered, dying flesh transformed into a jackal-headed demigod of obsidian flesh. Banded golden armor, tarnished with age and hung with votive strips embossed with sigils of Shurima, enfolded his chest and shoulders. He reached up and tore the cloth bindings from his staff to reveal his long hafted war-axe. Its edge glittered in anticipation, the ocean blue gemstone at its heart drinking in the sunlight.

“Stand aside,” he said.

The guards quailed in fear, but stood their ground. Nasus sighed and spun his axe in a looping arc. The end caught the first guard on an upward stroke and hurled him back thirty yards. His reverse stroke drove the second into the dust, leaving him groaning in pain as Nasus set a clawed foot on the bottom step.

He climbed toward the summit where the sun gleamed on the beaten metal of the disc. As he climbed, he looked beyond Vekaura’s crumbling city walls. An unbroken sea of barren dunes stretched to the horizon on three sides. On the city’s eastern flank, the land steadily rose into the haunches of rugged foothills of stubborn earth, upon which grew hardy desert palms and thick stands of bhanavar trees whose roots plunged hundreds of meters below the sand to find water.

The sight of Shurima as this empty desert saddened Nasus, thinking back to when the Mother of Life had nourished the land and it had bloomed with life and vitality. Perhaps Azir would bring life to Shurima once again, perhaps not, which made his task of finding the one who bore the bloodline all the more vital.

Other guards were moving to the top of the temple, shouting in a language that owed a debt to Ancient Shuriman, but had none of the beauty and complexity of that lost tongue.

Nasus remembered the pain and fear he’d felt during his final ascent of the Great Temple in preparation for his Ascension ritual. The wasting sickness had left him too weak to climb and he’d been carried in the arms of his younger brother. By the time they reached the summit, the sun was almost at its zenith and his life was pouring out of him like the sands of a broken hourglass. He’d begged Renekton to go, to leave him to meet the sun alone, but Renekton simply shook his head and whispered their last shared words as mortals before the sun disc took them both into Ascension.

“I will be with you until the end.”

Even now, those words still had the power to wound him, cutting deeper than any blade. As a mortal, Renekton was unpredictable; sometimes prone to violence and cruelty, but equally capable of great nobility and courage. The power Ascension granted him had made him mighty, and in the end, it had been Renekton who wrestled the treacherous magus into the Tomb of Emperors and sacrificed himself to save Shurima.

Save Shurima...?

Had anything they did that day saved Shurima? Azir had died, murdered by his boyhood friend, and the city was destroyed as the unchecked magic of the broken Ascension ritual buried it beneath the desert sands. He relived the moment he sealed the doors of the tomb behind Renekton and Xerath every day, knowing there had been no other choice, but burdened by crushing guilt nonetheless.

Now Xerath and Renekton were free. Azir had somehow conquered death to become one of the Ascended, and by his will was Shurima reborn. The ancient city had risen from its desert sepulcher and cast off the weary dust of its millennial slumber. But if the tales coming out of the desert were true, the Renekton Nasus had known and loved was gone. Now he was little more than a maddened killer that slaughtered without mercy in the name of vengeance.

“And I put you there,” said Nasus.

He reached the summit, and tried to set aside thoughts of what his brother had become; a monster that roared the name of Nasus over the burning sands of the desert.

A monster he would eventually have to face.

Nasus reached the top of the temple structure, the strips of votive paper fluttering from his arms and belt. He planted the haft of his axe on the rough stone and took a moment to survey his surroundings.

Sunlight reflected from the sun disc in splintered angles, the finish of its metal rough and unpolished. The braided ropes were painfully obvious up close, and the crudity of what Vekaura’s people had built was all too apparent. The roof was bare of ornamentation; no great dais carved with the celestial vault or cardinal winds, no etchings of the heroes who had Ascended upon its sacred surface.

Ten warriors in dusty cloaks and overlapping strips of bronze armor stood between Nasus and the hierophant. The priest was a tall, slender man in a long robe of iridescent feathers with wide, wing-like sleeves and a cowl that resembled an ebon beak. The face beneath the cowl was patrician, stern and unforgiving.

Just like Azir.

“You are Nasus?” said the hierophant. The man’s voice was deep and imposing, almost regal, but Nasus heard his fear. It was one thing to claim to be descended from gods, quite another to meet one.

“That you have to ask tells me I have been away for too long. Yes, I am Nasus, but, more importantly, who are you?”

The hierophant stood taller, puffing out his chest like a preening bird in mating season. “I am Azrahir Thelamu, Scion of the Hawk Emperor, First Voice of Vekaura, the Illuminated One, He Who Walks in Light and Keeper of the Sacred Fire. Bringer of the Dawn and-”

“Scion of the Hawk Emperor?” interrupted Nasus. “You claim lineage from Emperor Azir?”

“I do not claim it, it is who I am,” snapped the hierophant, a measure of confidence returning. “Now tell me what you want.”

Nasus nodded and spun his axe, holding it in both hands, horizontal to the ground.

“Your blood,” said Nasus.

He slammed the butt of his long-hafted axe against the stonework, and a cloud of sand lifted from the roof. It hung there in shimmering veils, spinning in a slow circle around the hierophant and his warriors.

“What are you doing?” demanded the priest.

“I told you, I need to see your blood.”

In the blink of an eye, the circling sand became a roaring hurricane. The warriors raised their arms to shield their faces from the whipping sandstorm and the hierophant bent double, blinded and choking on windblown dust. The sandstorm howled with all the fury of deep desert winds that could strip a flock of Eka’Sul to the bone in minutes. Armor was no protection, the sand penetrating every nook and cranny to reach the skin below and scour it raw. The sun disc swung back and forth in the winds Nasus conjured, its supporting ropes pulling taut on the iron rings fitted to the stonework.

Nasus let the fury of the sands fill him, his limbs surging with power and his body swelling as the desert’s wrath manifested within his dark flesh. His form loomed and grew, towering and monstrous like the first Ascended were said to be.

He attacked without warning, bludgeoning his way through the guards and smashing them aside with the haft of his axe or the flat of his blade. He had no wish to kill these men, they were sons of Shurima after all, but they were in his way.

He stepped over their writhing, groaning bodies toward the hierophant. The man lay curled in a ball, his bloodied hands held up to protect his face. Nasus reached down and lifted him by the scruff of the neck as easily as a hound might carry a pup. The hierophant’s feet dangled a yard off the ground as Nasus held him to his face.

The hierophant’s skin was red raw where the sand had scoured him, and tears of blood ran down his cheeks. Nasus moved closer to the sun disc. It wasn’t the real thing, wasn’t even gold, but it reflected the light of the sun and that would have to be enough.

“You say you are of the line of Azir?” he said. “Now we will see if that is true.”

He pressed the hierophant’s face against the sun disc, and the man screamed as the scorching metal burned his exposed skin. Nasus dropped the whimpering man and stared at the hissing blood running down the disc in red rivulets. The blood was already drying to a brown crust, and the scent of it filled his nostrils.

“Your blood is not that of the Ascended Bloodline,” said Nasus sadly. “You are not who I seek.”

He narrowed his eyes as he saw a radiant blue glow reflected on the surface of the disc from something in the far distance.

Nasus turned and looked to the horizon. A cloud gathered there, dust kicked up by the feet of marching men. Nasus saw the glitter of sunlight on speartips and armor through the dust. He heard the beating of war drums and the skirl of battle horns. Lumbering beasts emerged from the dust clouds, braying war-creatures yoked with knotted ropes and directed by groups of men armed with barbed goads. Protected by calcified skin plates and armed with curling horn-tusks, the beasts were living battering rams easily capable of smashing down Vekaura’s already ruined walls.

Behind the war-beasts, a host of tribal warbands advanced on the city beneath a wide variety of carved totems. Five hundred warriors at least; light skirmishers, whooping horse-archers, and fighting men bearing scale shields and heavy axes. Nasus felt the touch of a dominating will upon them, knowing that many of these tribes would normally tear each other’s throats out on sight.

Nasus felt the presence of ancient magic and the taste of metal flooded his jaws. His every sense heightened. He heard the babble of hundreds of voices from below, saw every imperfection in the bronze disc and felt every grain of sand beneath his splay-clawed feet. A sharp smell of blood, only recently staunched, stung his nostrils. It carried the faint trace of elder days and distant echoes of an age thought lost forever. It called to him from somewhere in the east of the city, at its very edge where the ruins merged with the hills.

The bearer of this awakening magic floated above the host; a being of crackling energy and dark power bound by chains of cold iron and the shards of an ancient sarcophagus. A traitor to Shurima and the architect of the ancient empire’s doom.

“Xerath,” said Nasus.

The ruined house on the eastern edge of Vekaura was crumbling, without much of a roof, and ankle deep in sand, but it had four walls and overhanging trees that offered shade during the hottest part of the day. Taliyah’s pack was propped up in the corner, ready to go as it always was. Skins of water and goat’s milk hung from its side, and enough dried meat to last her a couple of weeks had been packed alongside clothes and pouches of rocks and pebbles gathered from all over Valoran.

Taliyah knelt beside the injured woman lying in the shade and lifted the bandage from her side. She winced at the sight of crusted blood around the stitches she’d used to seal the deep wound. It looked like a sword cut, but she couldn’t be sure. Taliyah had stripped the woman’s armor and bathed her as best she could. Apart from the near-mortal wound in her side, the woman’s body was a map of pale scar tissue. All earned in a life of battle, and all but one to the fore. Whoever this woman was, only one of her enemies had not met her face to face. Taliyah replaced the bandage and her patient grunted in pain, her sleeping body trying to heal after the Great Weaver alone knew how much she’d suffered out in the desert.

“You’re a fighter,” said Taliyah, “I can tell that about you, so fight for your life.”

Taliyah had no idea if the woman heard what she said, but maybe her words could help the woman’s spirit find its way back to her body. In any case, it felt good to talk to someone; even if they didn’t answer back – unless you counted fevered mutterings about emperors and being dead.

Since leaving Yasuo in Ionia, Taliyah had tried to keep to herself, always on the move and never staying in any one place longer than necessary. She’d already stayed in Vekaura longer than she’d planned. This was supposed to be a quick stop to buy fresh supplies, but she couldn’t leave while the woman was still unconscious. The urge to find her family was all but overwhelming, but the Great Weaver taught that everyone was bound together in the warp and weft of life. To leave one thread to fray would, in time, affect them all. So Taliyah had stayed to honor her promise to the wounded woman, though every moment not spent trying to reach her family chafed her soul.

Taliyah brushed dark hair from the woman’s fevered brow and studied her face, trying to imagine how she had come to be wounded on the edges of the Sai. She was pretty, but had a hard edge to her not even unconsciousness could entirely soften. Her skin had the tanned sun-weathered texture of a native-born Shuriman, and when her eyes would occasionally flutter open, Taliyah saw they were a piercing blue.

She let out a sigh and said, “Well, I don’t think there’s a lot I can do until you wake up.”

Taliyah heard a thudding boom coming from the west. She moved to the window as she heard the unmistakable sound of rocks grinding on rocks. At first she thought it was an earthquake, but this was more like an avalanche, and she’d seen a fair few of them in her time. Given what she’d seen of the buildings in Vekaura, it wouldn’t surprise her if this was the sound of one falling down. She hoped nobody was hurt.

“What’s going on...? Where am I?”

Taliyah turned at the sound of the woman’s voice. She was sitting up, looking around her and reaching for something.

“You’re in Vekaura,” said Taliyah. “I found you outside, bleeding and half-dead.”

“Where’s my blade?” demanded the woman.

Taliyah pointed to the wall behind her, where the woman’s strange weapon was wrapped in its boiled leather sling and hidden under a woven blanket of interleaved bird motifs.

“Over there,” said Taliyah, “Its blades are very sharp and I didn’t want it anywhere I might trip over it and slice my foot.”

“Who are you?” said the woman, her tone laden with suspicion.

“I’m Taliyah.”

“Do I know you? Does your tribe want me dead?”

Taliyah frowned. “No. I don’t think so. We’re herders. Weavers and travelers. We don’t really want anyone dead.”

“Then you’re one of the few who don’t,” said the woman. She exhaled slowly, and Taliyah could only imagine how badly her side must hurt. She sat up and grimaced as her stitches pulled taut.

“Why would anyone want you dead?” asked Taliyah.

“Because I’ve killed a lot of people,” replied Sivir, struggling to sit up. “Sometimes because I was paid to. Sometimes because they were in my way. But these days, it’s usually because they get very angry when I tell them I’m not going back.”

“Back where?”

The woman turned her piercing blue eyes on Taliyah, and she saw a deep well of pain and turmoil within.

“The city,” she said. “The one that rose from the sands.”

“So it’s true?” asked Taliyah. “Ancient Shurima really is reborn? You’ve seen it?”

“With my very own eyes,” said the woman. “There’s a lot of people going there now. I saw tribes of the east and south mostly, but others will come soon enough.”

“People are going there?”

“More every day.”

“So why don’t you want to go back?”

“You’re tiring me out with all these questions.”

Taliyah shrugged. “Asking questions is the first step on the journey to understanding.”

The woman smiled and nodded. “Good point, but be careful who you ask. Some people answer questions with a blade.”

“Do you?”

“Sometimes, but since you saved my life, I’ll let it go.”

“Then tell me one more thing.”

“What?”

“Your name.”

“Sivir,” said the woman through her pain.

Taliyah knew the name; there were few in Shurima who did not, and she’d already had a good idea of who this woman was from the style of her cross-bladed weapon. Before she could reply, a new sound overtook the rumble of falling stones. She’d seldom heard anything like it in her homeland, but had heard plenty on the shores of Ionia, in the warrens of Noxus and on the icy wastes of the Freljord.

Taliyah eyed her pack, working out how long it would take her to escape Vekaura. Sivir heard the sound too, and swung her legs out as she tried to stand. The effort was almost too much for her and she grunted. Sweat beaded her brow with the effort.

“You’re in no state to go anywhere,” said Taliyah.

“Can you hear that?” said Sivir.

“Of course,” said Taliyah. “It sounds a lot like people screaming.”

Sivir nodded. “That’s exactly what it is.”

Fire was raining from the sky.

Comets of white blue flame leapt from Xerath’s outstretched arms, arcing like boulders from a war-machine. The first fell to earth in the market, exploding like a falling star. Searing fire detonated from the impact. Burning bodies were hurled into the air like blackened kindling. Fiery winds carried Xerath’s spiteful laughter, an ageless insanity that reveled in the pain of others.

How could I not see the evil in him before?

Nasus heard screams rising from the city and all his earlier anger at these people vanished like morning mist over an oasis. The city walls were smashed aside by the pain-maddened war-beasts that reared and stamped with ground shaking force. Lightly armored warriors streamed into the city over the rubble. They howled a dozen different war-cries, eager to begin the slaughter.

Nasus spun his axe and descended the temple steps, taking them four at a time until he was back on the ground. Hundreds of people streamed into the main plaza from the western edges of the city, fear pumping in their veins. Bloodthirsty yells and the clash of weapons followed them. Panicked citizens sought refuge in the buildings around the edges of the plaza, bolting doors and shuttering windows in the hope it would keep them safe. Nasus had walked the bloody streets of enough captured cities to know how brutal warriors could be after such battles. Xerath would see every man, woman and child in Vekaura put to the sword.

More fireballs slammed down like thunderbolts and the air filled with screams and the smell of burned flesh. Stone split and tumbled in cascades of molten rock from the impacts of the magical assault. The market was burning and pillars of black smoke smudged the sky.

Nasus pushed through the terrified crowds, moving steadily eastward, following the spoor of potent blood he now scented. The hierophant had been a fraud, his blood weak and diluted after thousands of years, but the one he now sensed...? They were strong. He could hear the thunder of a heart beating within a mortal breast. This person came from a line of emperors and warrior queens; men and women of towering ambition and strength. It was the blood of a hero.

People shouted his name, begging for help. He ignored them, knowing he served a higher calling. The sun had wrought him anew to serve Shurima beyond death, to fight for its people and defend them against their enemies. He served that purpose now, but leaving the inhabitants of Vekaura to their doom twisted a familiar barb of guilt in his soul.

How many more will you leave to die?

He pushed the thought aside, weaving a path through broken streets piled high with drifts of sand. Most of the buildings here had been claimed by the desert, little more than broken foundations and sheared stumps of square-cut columns. Desert scavengers fled at the sight of him as he drew ever closer to the thudding heartbeat. The city began to thin out, its ruins ever more buried in the encroaching sand.

Eventually he came to a crumbling structure that might once have served as a bathhouse, its walls thicker and stronger than those around it. He ducked as he entered, smelling the sweat and blood of two souls within. One young, and one with a soul so old it was like coming face to face with a friend who had walked beneath the same sun as he.

A young girl emerged from a doorway, clad in a free-flowing coat from a land across the eastern ocean – the same girl he’d spoken to in the souk. He felt her fear, but also her determination as her hands moved in curving, looping patterns as though weaving some naturalistic magic. The ground trembled, the stones danced at her feet and threw off their coating of sand. Behind her, Nasus saw a woman struggling to stand, using the peeling walls for support. Her tunic was soaked red. A grievous wound, but not yet a mortal one.

“I am Nasus, Curator of the Sands,” he said, but from the look in her eyes, she already knew who he was. Her mouth fell open in astonishment, but she didn’t move.

“Stand aside, girl,” said Nasus.

“No, I won’t let you hurt her. I made a promise.”

Nasus spun his axe, slinging it across his back as he took a step forward. The girl backed into the ruin, the ground rippling in radial patterns at her feet. Rock lifted from the ground as flakes of plaster peeled from the walls. Cracks split the stonework, racing upward to what remained of the roof. The last time he had faced someone with similar abilities he had been mortal and it almost killed him. The injured woman stared at the girl in shock. Clearly she was entirely ignorant of her companion’s abilities.

“You have the power to break the rock of Shurima,” said Nasus.

She cocked an eyebrow. “Yes. So you’d better back off before I break you.”

Nasus grinned at her bravado. “You possess a hero’s heart, girl, but you are not the one I seek. Your magic is strong, so if I were you, I would leave this city before Xerath rips it from you.”

Her skin paled. “I’m not going anywhere. I promised I’d protect Sivir, and the Great Weaver hates a broken promise.”

“If you are her protector, then know I am not here to hurt her.”

“So what do you want?”

“I am here to save her.”

The bandaged woman limped to stand at the young girl’s side. Though she was in obvious pain, Nasus was impressed at her resolve. But then, he should expect no less from one whose blood flowed directly from Ancient Shurima.

“Who’s this Xerath?” she asked.

“A dark magus who already knows too much of your existence.”

The woman nodded and turned to Taliyah, placing a callused hand on the young girl’s shoulder.

“I owe you my life, but I won’t be in anyone’s debt,” she said, “so consider your promise fulfilled. I can take it from here.”

The relief on the girl’s face was plain, but still she hesitated.

“I appreciate that, but you can barely walk,” said Taliyah. “At least let me help you out of the city.”

“Deal,” said Sivir gratefully, before turning back to Nasus. She swung her hand around to reveal a glittering cross-blade of gold, with an emerald gemstone at its center. She held it at the ready, a weapon no ordinary mortal could wield with such ease.

“I’ve had enough of people saving me lately,” she said. “They always want something in return. So tell me, big man, what do you really want?”

“To keep you alive,” said Nasus.

“I can do that without your help.”

“That wound in your side tells me otherwise. You are-”

“This?” said Sivir before he could finish. “Just a disagreement with some fools who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Trust me, I’ve had worse and walked away. And I don’t need protecting. Fate seems to be looking out for me these days, no matter what I do.”

Nasus shook his head. How little mortals understood of destiny.

“The future is not set in stone,” he said. “It is a branching river whose course can change at any moment. Even those whose fate is written in the stars can find the water of their lives run to barren ground if they are not careful.”

He gestured to Sivir’s weapon and said, “Do you know to whom that blade once belonged?”

“What does it matter?” said Sivir. “It’s mine now.”

“It is the Chalicar, the blade once borne by Setaka, foremost Warrior Queen of the Ascended Host; when enough of us remained for that name to mean something. I was honored to fight at Setaka’s side for three centuries. Her deeds were legendary, but I can see you do not know her name.”

“The fallen are forgotten,” said Sivir with a shrug.

Nasus ignored Sivir’s cold dismissal of his quiescent war-sister and said, “A desert stylite once told her she would see the sun rise on the day a Shuriman emperor ruled the entire world. It made her think she was invincible, for we were yet to conquer the world, but she was brought down by monsters on the eve of Icathia’s doom. I held her as her light dimmed and I sent her to her slumber far below the sands with her weapon upon her breast.”

“If you’re here to take it back, then you and I might have a problem.”

Nasus dropped to one knee and crossed his hands over his chest.

“You are of the Ascended Bloodline. The weapon is yours to bear, for the blood of emperors runs in your veins. It resurrected Azir and Shurima, so that has to mean something.”

“No, it doesn’t,” snapped Sivir. “I never asked Azir to bring me back. I don’t owe him anything. I don’t want anything to do with you or this Xerath.”

“Your wants are irrelevant,” said Nasus. “Xerath will kill you whether you embrace your destiny or not. He has come here to end the bloodline of Azir once and for all.”

“What does Azir want with her?” asked Taliyah. “And what is he going to do now that he’s back? Does he want to make us slaves?”

“She asks a lot of questions,” said Sivir.

Nasus hesitated before answering.

“In truth, I do not know what Azir plans. That he will stand against Xerath is enough for me. Now you can both meekly bare your necks, or you can live to fight another day.”

Sivir lifted her tunic to show her blood-wet bandage and gave a wry grin. “I’ve never done anything meekly in all my days, but I don’t plan to be fighting anything more threatening than sleep for a while.”

“You must live,” said Nasus, rising to his full height. “And you need to be ready.”

“Ready for what?” asked Sivir, as she and Taliyah began gathering up their few possessions.

“The battle for Shurima,” said Nasus. “So for now we must run. Xerath’s warriors are killing everyone in Vekaura.”

“What’s so special about this place?” asked Taliyah, shrugging on her pack.

“They are looking for her,” said Nasus.

Sivir’s face hardened and she let out a long breath before saying, “Nasus, eh? I’ve heard stories about you since I was a child. Stories of war and heroic battles. All the legends say that you and your brother were Shurima’s protectors, yes?”

“That is true,” said Nasus. “Renekton and I fought for Shurima over many centuries.”

Sivir took a halting step toward him, her face as set with imperious determination as Azir’s had been on the day he ordered the priesthood to prepare the sun disc for his Ascension, in defiance of centuries of tradition.

“Then fight for Shurima now,” said Sivir, as imperious as any emperor. “Sons and daughters of the desert are dying out there as we speak. If you’re the hero I’ve heard about all my life, then it’s your duty to get out there and save as many people as possible.”

This was not how Nasus had imagined this meeting to go, but Sivir’s talk of duty fanned an ember that had slumbered too long within his breast. He felt its flame spread through him, only now understanding how truly lost he had been all the long, lonely years since Shurima’s fall and subsequent rebirth.

“You have my oath it will be so,” said Nasus, reaching up to unhook a pendant hung on a leather thong around his neck. “If you both go now, I shall do all I can to protect Vekaura’s people.”

The stone of his pendant was jade, ocean green with veins of pale gold threading its surface. A faint light emanated from within, pulsing like a slowly beating heart.

He offered it to Sivir and said, “Wear this and it will keep you from Xerath’s sight. It will not last forever, but maybe long enough.”

“Long enough for what?” asked Sivir.

“For me to find you again,” said Nasus, turning away.

He left Sivir and Taliyah before he could change his mind, knowing their best chance of survival was to draw Xerath’s warriors to him. They watched him go, but he did not turn back. Flames burned at the center of the city, and Nasus followed the screams of Vekaura’s inhabitants.

His anger built as he passed the bodies of men and women cut down by the rampaging warriors – more deaths to add to the tally still to be settled between him and Xerath. Nasus rolled his shoulders to loosen his muscles. The last time he had faced the magus, his brother had been beside him, and a tremor of fear touched him.

We could not defeat him together. How can I defeat him alone?

Nasus saw a group of five warriors blocking the exit from the plaza. They had their backs to him, but turned at the sound of him unsheathing his axe. He should have felt their terror at the prospect of fighting an Ascended warrior, but the blue fire of Xerath’s will burned in their eyes and they feared nothing.

They rushed him with bloodied swords and spears. Nasus met their charge head on, swinging low and splitting three of them in half with a single sweep of the blade. He put his fist through the chest of another and fastened his jaws on the bare head of the last man. Nasus bit down and the warrior’s skull burst open.

He entered the plaza, seeing what remained of the city’s inhabitants kneeling at swordpoint before the sun temple, heads bowed like cowed worshippers. Groups of bloodied warriors thrust their spears aloft toward the bright and terrible god burning at its summit.

The burning body of the traitorous magus hung suspended in the air, the edges of the sun disc molten beneath the furnace heat of his Ascended body. The screaming figure of the hierophant writhed in the air before him.

“You mortals are fools,” said Xerath as he unraveled flesh from the bones of the hierophant’s body. “Why would you claim lineage to an emperor as worthless as Azir?”

“XERATH!” shouted Nasus, his voice echoing around the plaza.

The mortal warriors turned, but made no move to attack. Silence fell and Nasus felt the hatred radiating from Xerath wash over him like a surge tide. What was left of the hierophant’s body burned to cinders in a heartbeat, drifting away in the hot winds swirling around the magus. Nasus marched into the plaza with his axe held tight to his side as every pair of eyes turned his way.

“Of course it would be you,” said Xerath, his voice as honeyed as it had been when he walked as a mortal. “Who else but the coward who sealed me beneath the world for millennia?”

“I will put you back there,” promised Nasus.

Xerath’s form burned brighter. “You had your beloved brother to help you then. Tell me, have you seen Renekton since our shared prison was broken open?”

“Do not speak his name,” snarled Nasus.

“Have you seen what he has become?”

Nasus said nothing, and Xerath laughed, the sound like warring fire spirits.

“Of course you haven’t,” continued Xerath, the trapped flame of his being pulsing with dark amusement. “He would have killed you on sight.”

Xerath drifted down the crumbling walls of the temple, flames licking along his limbs and drifting away like fireflies. The dominated soldiers stood as still as statues. This confrontation was not for mortals.

“The power within you was meant for Azir,” said Nasus, taking slow steps toward Xerath. “You were not chosen by the sun.”

“Neither was Renekton, and he was raised up.”

“Do not say his name,” said Nasus through gritted fangs.

“Your brother was weak, but you knew that already, didn’t you?” said Xerath, drifting closer. “He broke more easily than I could have imagined. All it took was telling him how you abandoned him to the darkness. How you trapped him with his enemy and left him to die.”

Nasus knew the magus was goading him, but his hate blinded him to all else but sundering the chains that kept the unimaginable power of Xerath’s body contained. They faced each other in the center of the city, two Ascended beings out of time; a warrior king and magus of living magic.

Nasus attacked first, his body going from motionless to blinding speed in the space between heartbeats. His legs pistoned him into the air, his axe swinging overhead in a downward arc. The blade smashed into Xerath’s chest. Chain links exploded from the impact.

Xerath was hurled back into the walls of the temple. The stonework split apart and dust from the tomb far below billowed from zigzagging cracks. Vast panels of stone fell from the building. The magus hurled himself forward, searing beams of energy blazing from his crackling limbs. Nasus howled as Xerath’s fire burned him, and they slammed together with ferocious power.

A shockwave of magical energy exploded outward, spinning people away like leaves in a hurricane. The nearest buildings collapsed as the seismic force shattered their walls. Vekaura’s people fled, trying to find safety in the midst of these brawling gods of ancient days. His hold upon them broken, Xerath’s warriors scattered and ran for the edges of the city. Flames erupted as Xerath called arcane fire from the heart of his being and unleashed it indiscriminately.

Nasus rolled aside as a series of glittering comets slammed down. Their fire was cold, but burned just the same. He rose to his feet in time to use his spinning axe blade to deflect a series of screeching orbs of white light. Xerath floated in the air above him, laughing as forking lightning blazed around him. Nasus thrust his blade at the magus to unleash a burst of withering power. Xerath roared in pain and anger, the fire at his heart flickering, but undimmed.  

Nasus leapt toward Xerath. They grappled in mid-air to smash into the sun temple once again. The impact shattered the outer wall and huge blocks of stone toppled from the summit. They slammed down like the fists of ancient tomb guardians, cracking the earth and exposing the temple’s shadowed crypts. The remains of the sun disc fell from the roof, tumbling downward like the flipped coin of a giant. It shattered as it hit the ground, sending gleaming metal scything in all directions. A shard buried itself in the meat of Nasus’s thigh. He wrenched it clear, and shimmering blood ran down his leg.

Xerath rose from the wreckage of shattered stone and a searing bolt of pale fire struck Nasus in the chest. He grunted and staggered backward. Xerath unleashed another torrent of glittering magical energy and this time it hammered Nasus’s heart. The pain was all-consuming and he fell to his knees, his skin scorched and raw. Nasus could fight a mortal army single-handed, but Xerath was no ordinary foe. He was an Ascended being who wielded the stolen strength of the sun and the power of dark magic.

He lifted his head as the city burned around them. “The one you seek is not here and is now hidden beyond your sight.”

“The last of Azir’s brood cannot hide from me forever,” said Xerath. “I will find them and end that worthless bloodline.”

Nasus held his axe out, the gemstone upon its blade throwing off crackling lines of force.

“I will die before I allow that to happen.”

“As you wish,” said Xerath, his arms pulling back again and again to hurl arcing traceries of light. Nasus did what he could, but couldn’t stop them all.

Xerath drifted toward him, and said, “I told your brother over and over again of your betrayal and the jealousy you kept hidden from him. He cursed your name and wept as he told me how he would rend you limb from limb.”

Nasus roared and surged to his feet. A volcanic pillar of fire erupted beneath Xerath, and the magus bellowed as the shimmering fire of the Many Suns engulfed him.

But it wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. The last time they had fought, Nasus and Renekton had been at the height of their powers. Now Nasus was a shadow of his former glory, and Xerath’s power had been growing for centuries.

The magus shrugged off this last, desperate attack, and Nasus had nothing left to give. Xerath’s magic lifted him and swung him around, hurling him into the crumbling ruins of the temple. Stonework shattered around him and he felt his sun-fused bones snap like tinderwood.

Nasus came to a halt in the midst of the rubble, his legs broken and twisted beneath him. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, shattered from shoulder to wrist. He tried to push himself upright with his good arm, but white hot pain surged up his spine where his back had broken. His body could heal these wounds in time, but he had no time left.

“How far you have fallen, Nasus,” said Xerath drifting toward him with gobbets of liquid fire dripping from his fingertips like cinders. “I would pity you if I didn’t hate you for what you did to me. Your spirit has broken in the long years you wandered alone and burdened.”

“Better to be broken and burdened than an oathbreaker,” coughed Nasus through a mouthful of blood. “Even with all your newfound power, you are still a betrayer and a slave.”

He felt Xerath’s fury and reveled in it. It was all he had left.

“I am no slave,” said Xerath. “Azir’s last act was to free me.”

Nasus was stunned. Xerath a free man? It made no sense…

“Then why all this? Why betray Azir?”

“Azir was a fool and his gift was offered too late,” said Xerath.

Nasus grunted in pain. The splintered bones in his shoulder ground together as they began reknitting. He felt strength returning to his arm, but kept it limp and useless looking.

“What will you do when I am dead?” said Nasus, remembering how much Xerath had loved the sound of his own voice. “What will become of Shurima with you as its emperor?”

He tried to keep the pain hidden as his transformed flesh worked wonders within his body to undo the damage Xerath had done.

The magus shook his head and lifted out of reach.

“Do you think I cannot see your body renewing itself?” he said.

“Then come down and fight me!” cried Nasus.

“I have pictured your death a thousand times,” said Xerath, rising beyond the hollowed temple. “But never by my hand.”

Nasus watched the magus rise as the unsupported walls of the temple groaned and cracked, leaning in and ready to fall.

“The Butcher of the Sands will have his due,” said Xerath, his form blazing brighter than the sun disc ever had. Rocks and dust tumbled from above. “And I will be there to watch him claw the meat from your bones.”

The magus hurled chains of white fire into the crumbling walls and said, “But until then, I entomb you beneath the sands as you once trapped me.”

Xerath blazed like a newborn star and dragged his fiery chains inward. A thunderous rain of broken stones fell in an avalanche as murderous fire poured from the sky to fill Vekaura.

The ground felt like it was breaking apart, the rock beneath Nasus spinning and rising up to meet the cascade in a deafening tsunami of fluid stone. The walls of the temple crashed down, burying Nasus beneath hundreds of tons of debris.

After the darkness, light.

A sliver of hot brightness. Sunlight?

At first, he wasn’t sure if it was real or some trick devised by the mind to ease a body into death.

Was this how an Ascended being died?

No. This was not death. The sunlight moved across his field of vision, and he felt it warm his skin. He shifted his weight, extending his legs and rotating his shoulders. His limbs were renewed, which meant he had spent a considerable time in darkness. His body healed fast, but he had no idea how long he had spent unconscious.

However long it was, it was too long.

Xerath was free and stronger than ever.

Nasus reached up, seeing the rock above him formed a perfect dome, its rippled underside glass-smooth and warm to the touch. Even in the half-light, he could make out its patterned surface swirled like paint half-mixed on an artist’s palette. He slammed his fist against the sliver of light again and again until the rock finally split apart in chunks of stone vitrified by intense heat. Light flooded in and he saw the entire temple was now little more than a jumbled heap of smashed blocks. Nasus bent to lift a shard of the broken dome that had protected him. He turned it over in his hands, seeing blended material that had no business being in one piece of rock.

He slipped the dagger-like shard into his tunic and walked from the smashed sun temple. He surveyed the ruins as a mournful wind sighed, its breath freighted with mutterings of the dead.

The city was gone, or at least what its inhabitants had built upon its ruins. Nasus saw that much of the bedrock had buckled upward and had the same rippling texture of the dome that saved his life. The leading edge of every surface undulated like a glazed tidal wave frozen in mid-surge.

And from beneath that wave, sheltered from Xerath’s killing fire, came handfuls of Vekaura’s inhabitants. They came in ones and twos at first, then in small groups, blinking in the sunlight and amazed at their miraculous survival.

Nasus gave a small nod and said, “Shurima thanks you, Taliyah,” as he turned and made his way from the city.

The rest of Vekaura had returned to the desolate shell it had been the last time Nasus had ventured this way. Broken walls, shattered foundations and stumps of columns that stood like dead trees in a petrified forest. He had seen ruins like this before; in the wake of his first battle with Xerath when Shurima fell. Guilt had caused him to turn his face from the world then, but he would not do so now.

Xerath had spoken of Renekton as a blood-maddened beast, but Nasus knew his brother better than the magus ever had. Xerath saw only the beast Renekton had become; forgetting the noble warrior that lay beneath. The man who had selflessly offered his own life for his brother. The warrior who had willingly sacrificed everything to save his homeland from a betrayer. Xerath had forgotten all of that, but Nasus never would.

If Renekton lived, then a part of him must remember the hero he once was. If Nasus could reach that part of his brother, then he might lift him from the pit of madness. Nasus had long believed he would one day face Renekton, but until now he had always imagined that encounter would end with one of them dead.

Now he knew differently. Now he had purpose. The bloodline of Azir endured, so there was yet hope.

“I need you, Renekton,” he said. “I cannot kill Xerath without you.”

Before him, the desert called his name.

Behind him, the sand reclaimed Vekaura.

“How came you to Ionia, friend?”

Muramaat tried to keep her voice light. She had never felt uncomfortable sharing a campfire with other travelers along the road to the markets before. This, however, marked her first time sitting across the flames from a Noxian, one with an enormous weapon sheathed across her back.

How many Ionian lives has that blade claimed? she wondered.

The white-haired woman glanced at her “father” before swallowing a mouthful of charred peppers and rice, then cast her eyes down at her plate. “I was born in Noxus,” she said, her accent thick but her tonality nearly flawless. “I have not been back since the war, and I do not plan to return.”

The Noxian’s father, Asa Konte, smiled and placed his hand on her shoulder. “This is her home now,” he said with finality.

Muramaat had invited Asa to make camp with her before she had spotted the Noxian asleep in the back of his cart. He had introduced her as his daughter, Riven, in this same tone, with his chin jutting forward in preemptive defense. Muramaat hadn’t pushed back against the strange old man’s declaration then, but that didn’t mean his “daughter” was beyond scrutiny.

“You have not answered my question,” Muramaat pressed, the chimes of her mender’s necklace clinking together as she poured herself a cup of tea. “What brought you to our shores, Riven?”

Riven tightly gripped her plate, tension rippling through her shoulders. “I fought in the war.”

A simple statement, laden with sorrow. Curious, to hear regret from a Noxian.

“Why did you stay?” Muramaat asked. “Why would anyone stay in a place where they and their people have caused so much pain, so much destruction?”

Crack.

The plate had broken in half in Riven’s white-knuckled grip, her charred peppers and rice falling to the ground. With a gasp, she dropped the plate shards before bowing ruefully. “My deepest apologies,” she mumbled as she rose. “I will pay for this plate, and then we will leave you to your evening. I didn’t mean to intrude—”

But Muramaat wasn’t listening. Instead, she cradled the broken plate in her hands and held the shards to her ear, humming softly. Slowly, she adjusted her pitch, calling to the spirit within the clay.

The back of her skull tingled when she hit the right tone, as the spirit reverberated with her hum. Holding the note, Muramaat lifted her necklace and flicked its chimes until she found the one that joined her and the spirit in song.

She stared at the chime in the firelight—each one had been inscribed with a symbol that identified how to mend a resonant spirit. This symbol was for smoke, a single line with a curve that became more pronounced toward the end. Muramaat lifted the shards above the fire to bathe them in the smoke. It took only moments before they knitted back together, with only a few coal-colored seams and ridges to show that the plate had ever been broken.

“I’m a mender,” she said as she held the pottery out to a wide-eyed Riven. “No need to replace anything.”

Riven took the plate and examined it. “How does it work?” she asked, running a finger down a thick black seam.

“Everything has a spirit, and every spirit wants to be whole. I ask them what they need to mend, and give it to them.”

“It leaves scars,” Riven sighed.

“Scars are a sign of healing. That plate will never be seamless again, but it is whole. And it is strong. I’d even say it is more beautiful like this.”

Riven considered the plate in silence.

“I am still here,” she said after a moment, “because I have caused so much pain and so much destruction. I stay to atone.”

Muramaat nodded somberly. Clearly Riven’s scars, though invisible, ran deep. Perhaps this Noxian was different from the others.

But then Muramaat’s eyes fell to the hilt of Riven’s massive weapon. A tool for cutting, not mending.

How different can she really be?

Muramaat woke bleary-eyed to a loud thump against the side of her caravan. Bandits. Riven had insisted on keeping watch through the night, Muramaat remembered as she grabbed her heaviest kettle. But the mender was experienced in dealing with robbers and could always hold her own in a fight.

When she opened her door, however, she saw that Riven would not need her help after all.

One of the intruders lay crumpled at the foot of the caravan. By the fire stood Riven, surrounded by three hulking bandits. She held the enormous hilt, and Muramaat was surprised to see only a broken blade attached to the end. Yet the weapon was still formidable. It seemed to pulse in Riven’s hands as she waited for the others to advance.

Muramaat’s stomach turned to see that blade, not relishing the sight of a Noxian spilling more Ionian blood... but still she watched.

The bandits rushed at Riven, yelling incoherently, but she took a single step forward and repulsed them with a burst of energy from her blade. They dropped their weapons, then scrambled to find them in the dark. Riven could have cut them all down, Muramaat realized, but she didn’t. Instead, she raised her sword, which began to glow an eerie green. The magic from the weapon blasted outward and repelled one of the bandits as soon as it touched him. He fell to the ground in a catatonic daze.

By this point, the others were on their feet, weapons in hand. Riven brought her arm back, and glowing pieces of metal raced toward the Noxian from the cart. The shards formed around the blade, making it look almost whole—though there were still gaps between the pieces. The bandits rushed her again.

Or so they tried. Riven whipped the blade in front of her and blew them back against the caravan with a sudden gust of wind, knocking them all unconscious.

A bloodless victory.

Muramaat stepped gingerly over the defeated bandits. “What will you do with them?” she asked Riven, who had barely broken a sweat.

Riven shrugged, letting the shards of her sword drop to the ground. “I’ll just tie them to a tree until morning.”

Muramaat stared at the remnant of the blade. It didn’t seem as threatening anymore, now that she had seen how Riven wielded it. “Could I see your weapon?”

Riven frowned and took a step back. “Why?”

“You don’t need to hand it to me. Just hold it up.”

Warily, Riven raised the blade. Muramaat closed her eyes and hummed.

“What are you doing?” Riven asked in alarm, just as Muramaat found the right pitch—

—a pair of eyes, searching—

—three hunters, hearts filled with hate, thoughts with revenge—

—burning—

—everything, burning—

Muramaat didn’t realize she had fallen until she felt Riven shake her. “Are you all right?”

“Someone,” Muramaat whispered, her throat dry, “is searching for this blade. For you.”

Riven blanched, but her eyes revealed nothing of her thoughts. “What did you do, Muramaat?” she asked in a low whisper.

“I was wrong to question you. I wanted to offer my apologies by mending your sword.”

“No.” The intensity of the word took Muramaat by surprise. “If you truly want to thank me, you will never fix this blade.” Riven chuckled, a bitter sound. “The one thing I would want you to fix, you can’t. But... thank you. For the offer.”

She sighed, exhausted, and collected up the shards of her sword.

“You should go back to sleep if you want to get to the marketplace early tomorrow.”

Muramaat nodded and slowly made her way to her caravan. When she looked back, Riven was at the fire, sitting and watching the night.

Not for the first time, Muramaat wished she knew how to mend people.