LoL Universe Indexing and Search

Neeko was born on a remote and largely unknown island, far to the east, where the last members of an ancient vastayan tribe remained isolated from the rest of the world. They were called the Oovi-Kat, and could trace their lineage generation by generation back to the legendary Vastayashai’rei—the ancestors of all vastaya.

The Oovi-Kat were peaceful beings, of unrivaled potential. Their harmonious society blended seamlessly with the spirit realm, so that their sho’ma—their spiritual essence—could intermingle with other beings through mere proximity, and even help them mimic other physical forms. No secrets existed between the Oovi-Kat, but few were as curious, resilient, or energetic as young Neeko.

She developed a fondness for games, hiding trinkets and thoughts to see if others could find them. Her inquisitive nature knew no bounds, and she was pure and innocent in her charmed existence.

But it was not to last. Cataclysm loomed on the horizon.

Thanks to the quick thinking and self-sacrifice of the Oovi-Kat elders, Neeko escaped the death of her homeland. She clumsily took the form of a bird, and fled the smoldering destruction, feeling the screams of her people fading into the ethereal gulf between realms.

Days later, desperate and exhausted, Neeko plummeted into the sea. She clung to driftwood, entirely at the mercy of the currents, until an odd silhouette rose into view. She could hear voices carrying over the waves, and so she swam toward the strange structure.

With the last of her strength, she crept aboard what turned out to be a mercantile vessel destined for Harelport. Neeko rested where she could, calling out into the spirit realm for her lost tribe. She felt only scattered, sad echoes in response, and images of towering, dead trees that lay somewhere over a fragile horizon…

When Neeko emerged from the ship into the city, it was a strange and unfamiliar new world. All her senses tingled. Many a creature, even another Oovi-Kat, might be afraid in that situation—but not Neeko. The society bustled with unique personalities, strangers with a vast array of motives and shapes. This was a place of countless stories and experiences, and it entranced her completely.

Before she could get far, she was spotted by a vastayan sailor named Krete. Neeko could not understand all his words, but he demanded to know which tribe she belonged to. Neeko reached out with her sho’ma, mimicking his face and expression to make her peaceful intentions understood, but Krete did not seem to like this at all. Overwhelmed by his darkening thoughts, Neeko fled into the crowd, altering her shape many times until she escaped.

Surrounded by lush, tropical greenery in the hinterlands beyond Harelport, Neeko grappled with her recent experiences. She simply could not understand how anyone might rely solely on words as their singular form of communication. It seemed so… limiting?

Seeking solace, she took on the shape of the sleek jungle cats she encountered among the trees, and tried to run with them. Neeko loved being fast and agile, and their bright, keen eyes reminded her of home—until, quite unexpectedly, the leader transformed into a beautiful, strong, dark-haired woman. After a tense standoff, she introduced herself as Nidalee, and reluctantly accepted Neeko into the group.

Neeko hesitated to entrust the truths of the Oovi-Kat to others, but she felt a deep kinship with Nidalee, because she suspected this bestial huntress might share some forgotten connection with the vastayan race. Their friendship blossomed, and for many months they roamed the wilds together.

But the towns and cities, with all their flaws, still called to Neeko. Her ancestors came to her in dreams, showing her the pale branches of those dead trees, over and over. The trees needed color, to bloom again—of that much, Neeko was certain. She asked her friend to join her on this new journey, but Nidalee could not be persuaded.

Crestfallen, but determined, Neeko set out alone.

Her old life among the Oovi-Kat may be lost forever, but Neeko envisions a magical future—a larger tribe of like-hearted vastaya, yordles, humans, and whatever other creatures might share her dream. As far as she is concerned, everyone has the potential to find a place in her new tribe. She has pledged to seek these souls out, to befriend them, and defend their sho’ma with her life.

To know Neeko is to love Neeko, and to love Neeko is to be Neeko.

If there was one thing Marcin knew how to do, it was to keep his head down.

Before him, rowdy voices intermingled with the clatter of tankards and the sloshing of beer. Every once in a while, someone barked a drink order, and just as soon as their coin landed on the bar, a drink slid in front of their waiting hands. His quick and silent service kept him unnoticed—and as such, uninvolved in any trouble.

And there was always trouble.

It took on many forms. A belligerent brawler, itching for a fight. A transaction among cloaked figures that ended with a dagger through a throat. Or, perhaps most unexpectedly, a little girl, pushing through the heavy tavern door.

Marcin watched the girl hum and skip her way toward the bar. Behind her, the door slammed shut, one last swirl of winter air blasting across the room, the loud bang grabbing the last few eyes that weren’t already following her, baffled by her presence.

The girl clambered up a stool, barely peeking over the edge of the bar. Marcin took in the child’s bright red hair, the tattered toy clutched in her grip, the frayed satchel on her back, and the ragged, unseasonably short-sleeved, dress.

“What can I get for you?” he asked.

The girl stood on the stool and plopped her toy on the counter, peering at the many bottles on shelves. Marcin could see it was a stuffed bear, once well crafted, since well loved. The stitching at its limbs were visible after many years of stress. Somewhere in its life it had lost one of its button eyes.

“Could I get a glass of milk, please?”

Marcin raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He walked toward the far end of the bar to fetch the ceramic jug.

“Awfully late for you to be out by yourself, ain’t it?” a deep voice rumbled.

Marcin sighed. Trouble always attracted more trouble. He pulled the jug down from the shelf and gazed back down the bar. A large man next to the girl had turned to peer down at her with his one good eye. Seated in front of him, the girl looked like a pebble at the foot of a mountain. He was a pile of muscles criss-crossed with scars. The loops of ropes, chains, and hooks at his belt, along with the massive blade slung across his back, loudly announced him as a bounty hunter.

The girl looked up at him and flashed a smile. “I’m not alone. Tibbers is here with me. Aren’t you, Tibbers?” She held up the bear, beaming.

The bounty hunter laughed out loud. “Surely your parents must be missing you.”

The girl’s hands dropped to her side as her eyes drifted down and away. “I don’t think so,” she replied.

“Aw, but I do think so. Would pay a pretty penny to see you home safe, I imagine.” Marcin could practically hear the coins clinking in the bounty hunter’s mind, the man already tallying up the prize for her safe return.

“They can’t. They’re dead.” The girl plopped back down on the stool, staring into the button eye of her bear.

The bounty hunter started to speak again just as Marcin placed the mug down on the counter with a percussive thud.

“Your milk,” he said.

The girl turned and beamed at him, breaking from her sullen mood.

“Thank you, sir!”

She set her bear on the table and reached back into her knapsack. Marcin waited, prepared to accept any coin she put down as payment enough.

He did not expect the massive purse that landed with a clatter.

A few golden coins bounced onto the counter, one rolling toward the edge. Marcin stopped it on reflex, one finger pinning the escapee. Slowly, he lifted it from the bar, its heft and texture proclaiming it as authentic Noxian mint.

“Oopsie!” the little girl giggled.

Marcin swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. He reached over, hoping to shove the coin and the purse back into the girl’s satchel before anyone else noticed—

“That’s a mighty big purse for a mighty small girl,” the bounty hunter growled, far too loudly.

“Tibbers found it,” the girl replied.

The bounty hunter snorted. “Is that so?”

“It was on the man who stopped me in the road. He was a real meanie.” The girl took a sip of her milk, her attention back on her bear.

“That’s too bad…” The bounty hunter leaned in closer on his stool, hand sliding towards the purse.

The girl looked up at him, a playful smile dancing across her face.

“Tibbers ate him.”

For a moment, everything stood still. Then the bounty hunter’s laugh cut across the room.

“I’m sure he did,” he roared. He thrust a meaty hand forward, grasping the toy by the head and yanking it away from the girl. “This big ol’ scary monster.”

“Let Tibbers go!” the girl cried out, reaching up for the bear. “He doesn’t like being pulled.” The bounty hunter just laughed harder.

Marcin pocketed the coin in his hand and turned away, walking unnoticed toward the back. He wished he could help, but he hadn’t survived this long by sticking around longer than he should.

Her voice stopped him cold.

“I said. Let. Tibbers. Go.”

The words rumbled with gravel and rage, cutting through the din. Against all his better judgement, Marcin paused and looked back. The girl stood on the bar, staring at the bounty hunter, fury smoldering in her eyes.

Then chaos erupted.

A flare of light and a burst of heat erupted from the girl. Too late, Marcin threw his arms up, crying out in pain. He stumbled back, knocking into the shelves behind him. Several bottles crashed around him as he ducked beneath the bar, cursing his idiotic hesitation. The screams of men and the sound of breaking wood punctuated a growing roar of flame. A guttural, impossible sound reverberated through the air, rattling his bones. Marcin crawled, still half-blinded, toward where he hoped the doors to the kitchens were. Around him, the screams heightened—then stopped with a stomach-turning crack.

For the second time that day, Marcin forgot all his honed skills of avoiding trouble and peered over the edge of the bar.

A hulking beast loomed, silhouetted against the firelight. Thick strands of sinew bound its limbs to its torso like stitching. With a start, Marcin realized the beast itself burned, unharmed by the hungry tongues of flame that danced across its fur. In its claws it held aloft, by the head, the slumped, bloody form of the bounty hunter, a limp rag doll in the massive paws of the monster.

Before it, the little girl stood wreathed in fire.

“You’re right, Tibbers,” she said. “He didn’t like being pulled either.”

Marcin looked around the room in horror. Throughout his tavern, overturned chairs and tables ignited, raising a thick, black smoke. The smell of blood and burning flesh crawled inside his nose, and Marcin choked back a cough, his stomach turning.

The beast turned and looked at him.

A whimper escaped Marcin’s lips. He gazed into the glowing abyss of the bear’s eyes, and swallowed in the certainty of his end.

A peal of laughter rang out over the crackle of flames.

“Don’t worry,” the little girl said, peering around the monstrosity. “Tibbers likes you.”

Marcin watched, frozen, as the girl hopped, skipped, jumped her way through the burning tavern, the beast lumbering behind her. He stared as it smashed the heavy door off its hinges. He gaped as the little girl turned back one last time, a sweet smile back on her face.

“Thanks for the milk, sir.”

And then, the girl walked out into the snowy night as the tavern collapsed behind her.

The colossal brazier flared to life, its flames reaching high into the air. In times past, the gathered tribes would use this as the mark of the festival’s beginning.

The harvest festival had always been the largest celebration of the year for the tribes, and one of the last before winter set in on the plains. As the fire was lit, cheers should have echoed up the frozen slopes of the mountains, calling down blessings from the Three Sisters. Now, though, the mass of gathered Avarosans remained silent as they turned away from the flames to look up to the stage where Ashe stood.

She let her eyes roam over them. No festival had ever seen so many gathered together, and she knew they had come to see her.

She grabbed her bow and unslung it, the now-familiar piercing chill of the True Ice surging through her body. The cold was still painful, even after all her time with the weapon—but now she welcomed it, using it to focus and block out distractions. She lifted her gaze from the crowd to the roaring flame, and took a deep breath as she pulled back the bowstring. All other sounds of the festival faded.

A crystal arrow of pure cold formed, beckoned forth by the deep magic coursing through the bow. Ashe held her breath as she let it continue to channel magic through her arms. The temperature on the stage plummeted, frost creeping out from beneath her feet.

When the cold threatened to finally overwhelm her, she released her breath and let the arrow fly.

It arced high over the crowd, and slammed into its target with a deafening crack. In an instant, the brazier was frozen over, the dancing shapes of the fire enveloped by the spreading ice. The setting sun shone through the crystalized flames and onto the crowd below, and finally the cheer broke out. The crowd invoked the blessings of the Three—Lissandra, Serylda, and Avarosa herself, reincarnated in Ashe.

Ashe kept her address short.

“Avarosans! Never before has a harvest festival seen so many. Sit with your kin from across the snows—we are one family now. Eat, drink, and enjoy!”

She smiled as the crowd cried out her name. She raised her bow high, and the cheers rose higher in response.

Inwardly, she grimaced. As so often, she wondered if it was her leadership that drew them all together, or the weapon she carried. It was the symbol of Avarosa, and many in the Freljord believed that, as its wielder, she was Avarosa reborn. Ashe slung the bow over her shoulder and shook the thought. Why they joined wasn’t as important as what they had become. She hopped off the stage and moved into the crowd as they dispersed to feast-laden tables.

The boisterous tribes mixed together, sharing food, drink, and tales of hunts past. The Stonepicks described the warm yet treacherous southern mountains. Ashe cheered with the others when the Red Snows recounted the defeat of the Noxian warbands that had tried to advance inland from the coast. A warrior from the Ice Veins, storied blizzard walkers one and all, clapped Ashe on the back as she passed, sending a strange chill through her.

All these and more had responded to her call and joined the festivities. All had pledged themselves to the Avarosans, and each tribe needed her to be something different. A prophet, a savior, a mediator. A Warmother.

Ashe would be them all if she could.

As she neared the far end of the feast, though, she froze. At the last table, sitting somber and removed from the rest, was a group of Iceborn that she knew all too well—the Snow Followers, vengeful zealots who had slaughtered a whole tribe only months ago.

A tribe whose only crime had been joining the Avarosans.

A large woman, doubtless their leader, rose and approached Ashe. “Warmother Ashe, Avarosa’s chosen, wielder of Her divine bow. My name is Hildhur Svarhem, truthbearer and Warmother of the Snow Followers.”

Ashe imagined the sight of the scorched huts again, the screams of her people dying in agony, and her fury ignited. The crowd around them quieted as Hildhur continued, whispers spreading quickly. All gathered had heard of what the Snow Followers had done.

“We swore an oath that no faith-traitors would ever again follow those falsely claiming to be Avarosa reborn. Your warriors fought bravely, but not well.” She unslung a large war-axe from her back, its blade coated in a thin but clear layer of True Ice. A true Iceborn, she bore the discomfort of the weapon’s chilling effect silently.

Ashe measured the woman’s wide stance, counted the few steps between them. Dried blood matted Hildhur’s armor—more Avarosan blood? Ashe’s muscles tensed as she prepared to move. She was ready for any attack.

What she was not ready for, however, was for the Warmother to kneel, lower her head, and offer up the war-axe with both hands.

“Forgive us, Warmother Ashe. I did not know then what I do now. I came to challenge you before all your followers, to unmask you as a false prophet. But the magic you wield is beyond any I have ever witnessed. None can deny that She speaks through you. I offer you my axe, Joutbane, and my head. Spare my people, that they may prove their worth by hunting, farming, and dying in your name.”

Each of the gathered Snow Followers followed their Warmother’s example, kneeling in deference.

At once, voices from the crowd called for vengeance. “Death to the raiders!” they cried.

Barely more than smoldering ruins when Ashe had arrived, the skeletal remains told the story of a village surrounded. The few warriors had been easily identified, for their bodies were untouched by fire, but hacked down and left for the crows. The rest of the tribe had hidden in their homes, praying for mercy, or simply a quick death.

They received neither…

Eyes welled up with fury, Ashe reached for the axe. She would take Hildhur’s head, as a warning to any who would—

As her hand clasped around it, and the True Ice sent the familiar spike of cold through her arm, Ashe felt her bow beginning to radiate against her back. A slow, chilling pulse, like a winter breeze.

Her mind calmed.

“Stand, Hildhur,” she said, looking down at the war-axe.

Hildhur rose, furrowing her brow in confusion. Ashe met her probing gaze.

“The Snow Followers have shed the blood of my tribe, and they are my enemies,” she continued. “But you have shown humility and remorse, here and now. You are not the Snow Followers any longer—from today forward, you are Avarosan, and that makes you family. You have nothing to fear from me, cousin.”

She thrust the war-axe back into the woman’s hands, and the tension in the air broke. Soon enough, the celebrations were underway again, the joyous feelings redoubled by forgiveness and mercy. Ashe walked to everyone seated at the table, welcoming each in turn.

As she turned from them and walked away, she was careful to keep her grief in check. Her heart still burned, but her people needed her to walk a different path than that of revenge. She played her fingers along the bowstring, seeking comfort in its chill.

She would be better. She must.

Senna’s journey to become a Sentinel of Light started with darkness. It started with the Black Mist…

Senna first encountered the Mist at an early age, when wreckage from a distant Harrowing washed onto the shores of her home island. The Black Mist within the wreckage awakened upon contact with life. She and her village survived the ensuing storm of souls, thanks to the intervention of a nearby Sentinel… but in the wake of the attack, the Mist was still mysteriously drawn to Senna.

She was cursed, marked by the Mist so its horrors pursued her endlessly, the darkness drawn to her like dying moth to living flame. She could never know when it would strike next—but worse was when it didn’t come, and Senna had to imagine what awaited in every shadow.

The Sentinel who saved Senna, a brusque veteran named Urias, did not understand why the Mist was drawn to a solitary girl—but he knew if she was going to survive, she had to learn to fight back. And so, Senna joined Urias in the Sentinels of Light, a sacred order that could be traced back to the Blessed Isles, where the Black Mist originated. She proved to be a deadly enemy of darkness, mastering the relic-stone pistol Urias gave her, learning to channel her soul into light.

Yet even as Senna grew comfortable working with Urias, relying on him for gruff guidance, she learned to keep others at gun’s length. If she allowed them to get too close, they would only be hurt when the Mist came again. Senna could never stay in one place for long, something she and Urias learned when those who offered them shelter inevitably found themselves under siege. After even Urias was slain, Senna wasn’t sure if she could let anyone get close again.

Reluctantly, Senna sought out Urias’ family in Demacia, to tell them of his fate. There, she met his son, Lucian, who would not relent until Senna allowed him to join Urias’ parting vigil. From the very first moment she found herself flustered, wondering if her walls were enough to keep out someone so stubborn, full of humor and love. It became clear over time that Lucian’s place was with the Sentinels, as Senna’s partner, and Senna as his.

The more they served together, the deeper their bond became, and Senna realized that the value of her walls wasn’t what she kept out, but who she let in. Yet as Lucian’s love for Senna grew, so did his desire to save her from her curse. In time, it became his only focus, the light in his eyes passing into his gun—making Senna wary that Lucian would only see sorrow where there was love.

It was while researching a cure that Senna and Lucian came into conflict with the sadistic wraith Thresh. So close to answering mysteries about the Ruination and Senna’s curse, Lucian refused to turn back…

Thresh’s chains whipped toward Senna as she stood between the wraith and her husband. More painful than the scythe was seeing the look of anguish on Lucian’s face. With her last breath, Senna screamed for Lucian to run.

But as Senna felt the deathblow and knew she had lost, she realized there was a glimmer of hope. Her whole life, the Mist had haunted her—she didn’t need to fear it anymore. She could ride it into the darkness of Thresh’s lantern, and see what was inside.

Her curse had become her only chance for salvation.

While Lucian spent years seeking to grant his beloved peace, Senna explored her spectral prison. She learned that life had been the origin of her curse. Its spark shone brighter within her than in anyone else—she’d been infected with it when she first encountered the wreckage that brought the Harrowing. There, she’d been touched by a powerful, lingering soul, given its unnatural life…

It was life that the Black Mist could never let go.

She could use this force to pull the Mist into herself, empowering her to sever its hold over others in the lantern. Among the souls she freed were Sentinels who possessed lost knowledge of the Ruination’s origins, of her curse… and the love that created it.

When Lucian drove his broken pistol into the lantern, intending to end the torture of the souls within, Senna was waiting. She escaped, shrouded in Mist she’d drawn from other souls. She was dead, but also alive, thanks to her curse, wielding a relic-stone cannon that could channel darkness along with light, forged from the weapons of fallen Sentinels.

No longer running from the Mist, Senna now understands the suffering of the souls within. Though it is painful, she draws their Mist into herself, liberating them, and blasting darkness with darkness. Embracing her death every time she transforms into a wraith, she becomes like those she fought, only to be reborn again thanks to the life infecting her.

Though Senna and Lucian’s love survived even death, now they face the consequences of her rebirth. Senna knows what they have to do next, a secret gleaned within the lantern.

Find the Ruined King, and stop him at any cost…

The fog had come in swiftly, eclipsing the afternoon sun over the crossroads. Jonath had tried to find his way between the thick tendrils, the world around him darkened by an impenetrable shroud. Shapes pushed at the fabric of the mist, grasping for purchase. Reaching for him from beyond.

He fumbled with the reins in his hands, trying to find the nerve to do what he had to. So he could mount up and ride for safety.

“Don’t do this, boy. We all have a duty.”

Jonath blinked the fear from his eyes, fixating on the knight slumped over the steed. He had found her like this, still mounted but unable to even right herself in the saddle. Her armor was pierced and slick with blood, although Jonath didn’t know what manner of weapon could have inflicted these wounds. The knight was dying all the same.

In her eyes, he saw judgment—they found him weak. Unworthy. She gripped the reins firmly in one plated fist, pulling him in close.

“We must carry word to the capital. You... the heir must know. Tell Prince Jarvan what is happening here, the garrison cannot hold them off.”

Faint sounds of battle from the south told Jonath that the beings in the mist had reached Havenfall. The air around him grew colder, darker. The inky mist pulsated, inching close. Havenfall’s knights were none of his business. The supposed elite of the crown had never done anything for him. And the people there...

Screwing shut his eyes, Jonath ripped the reins from the knight, trying to ignore her pained gasp as she rolled out of the saddle and hit the ground.

“Protector forgive me,” he whispered, his voice wavering. This was no worse than the other times he’d taken horses, he tried to tell himself as he mounted.

The war steed’s bulk instilled a measure of calm in him. Running a hand down the stallion’s muscled neck, Jonath looked around the crossroads to get his bearings. The eastbound road led to the Great City, with its high walls and countless soldiers. What warning did they need? Surely, whatever foul magic urged the claws and voices in the mist would be no match for the capital’s defense of stone and steel. Just to the south lay Havenfall, his home. Moments ago, he could see its glinting rooftops and rows of masts from where he now stood. Behind the town lay open country, as far as a horse could carry him.

Jonath had spent days beyond count riding across those rolling hills, racing incoming ships along the white cliffs overlooking the bay, letting the sea stiffen his hair with salt, rejoicing in the thrills of unchecked freedom. He’d never kept any he took. He was no thief who deserved to be exiled to the Hinterlands. He borrowed horses, always returning them at the end of his excursions, tired but unharmed.

How will I return this one? If I leave her to—

No. It wasn’t his fault she had gotten in the way of this mist and squandered her chance at survival—for Jonath to take his did not make him guilty of her death. No matter what he did, he had always been deemed insufficient. He had a hand with horses and the will to work, but even his elders—horse breeders and traders—had shunned him for his unwillingness to put the demands of others ahead of his own needs. No use in talent if he couldn’t be relied on, they said. No use in the approval of people who didn’t value true freedom, thought Jonath. Not to mention the garrison, who glorified obedience above all else, sneering at him down gilded lances even when he came to prove his mettle on the recruiting fields.

Well, out in the hills, chasing the wind on the back of an unbroken steed, he was the exemplar. He would outrun this unnatural mist, and lose himself among the ranging herds.

Jonath spurred the stallion, making for the southern path, as time slowed down around him. The stallion flattened his ears, suddenly rigid under Jonath. Whatever had scared it was beyond the natural din of battle, something that didn’t belong here; Jonath felt it, too. Primal fear seized him, squeezing his chest with an unyielding grip. The mist pulled close, then pulsed clear of the crossing, as if limbs within were pulling the veil aside. Jonath heard nothing in the deathly stillness.

Then came the sound of steeled hooves on hard-pack road.

As the veil parted, Jonath made out riders in the gloom. Even though he could hear the mounts at full gallop, the clatter of plate armor, and the whipping of stirrups, the echelon appeared immobile—like a framed tableau of nobles on the hunt, or the crown’s elite on the charge, come at the last second to defend the citizenry against the dangers beyond the border. But these were not Demacian knights, nor saviors from fairy tales. These riders were not here to protect. They were girded in black-iron plate, and an evil light glowed in their motionless eyes. A bannerman carried a still pennant, the beating fabric audible nonetheless. A hornblower, lipless mouth deadlocked around his instrument, sounded the attack.

The mist shrieked. Heeeecaaaariiiim.

It was a name—somehow, Jonath knew. The mist heralded his coming.

It was the name of death itself.

As this realization staggered Jonath, he noticed the rider at the lead. He was gigantic, towering over his retinue, shaking the ground with each unmoving stride. His eyes, bright with inner fire, took in all before them. Even staring ahead, they seemed to bore into Jonath, searing through him, filling him with an ancient dread.

The rider turned his head, and smiled.

Jonath let out a cry, recoiling with instinctual fear. He flailed, kicking back to stay in the saddle, startling his stallion. The mount reared, throwing Jonath to the ground with a dry thud. Galvanized by the shock, the animal bolted into the darkness. Jonath groaned, his head ringing with the impact. He pressed his forehead against the dry earth, dust packing his nostrils with each panicked breath. He wished he could pray away what he would see when he looked up.

“Rise, squire,” a grinding voice said, a smile pulling the syllables taut. “Find your courage... Look at me.”

The words were guttural, each syllable slowly surfacing as if rising from the depths of a furnace. Jonath could not place the accent, but he had heard its mocking tone before. A sting of old spite made him raise his head.

Crudely shod hooves burned the soil where they stood. The rider’s horse seemed to be made entirely of blackened iron, glowing from within with green fire. Jonath’s breath caught in his throat as he saw the rider was not saddled on this unnatural steed—he was fused with it. What was he? Had he come as punishment for Jonath’s crime? The monstrosity laughed, slowly raising an infernal glaive.

Tears ran down Jonath’s face, his mind seizing hold of the only thought it could. Protector forgive me. Protector forgive me.

But the blow never fell. Instead, the monster called one of his ghostly riders closer. The rider, too, was not a horseman at all, but fused at the midriff with the body of a horse. The entire echelon was deformed like their leader. Hecarim gripped the rider’s neck and slowly, effortlessly, ripped his torso from the equine trunk. The rider, trailing green smoke, made no sound, twitching erratically. Where his body had been, there was now the head of a withered, armored destrier.

“We’ll be back for you later,” the leader chuckled as he released the rider’s spirit. The spirit floated mid-air, aimless now that it had been severed from its animal half. The rest of the undying echelon remained utterly motionless, frozen in time.

Hecarim turned his gaze to Jonath.

“I claim this land by decree of King Viego, regent of the Shadow Isles. Let my loyal knights witness that Hecarim, Conqueror of Helia, Grand Master of the Iron Order, honors his foes with a fair fight.” The words twisted around his smirk. “So, find your courage, noble squire, and mount up. War has come.” He presented the reins of the spectral destrier to Jonath.

Jonath took in Hecarim, the tone of his offer betraying it for the lie it was. He looked around him, the echelon of knights looming, immovable rictus grins carved into their skeletal faces. His mind screamed in tune with the whispers behind the veil. Let soldiers deal with these monsters. He grabbed the reins and, with one motion, swung up into the saddle.

The steed’s body was solid yet incorporeal at the same time, the heavy barding hissing where it moved against the beast’s bulk. Where he would sense a horse’s character, Jonath felt only emptiness. Where he should feel a union of kindred minds, he teetered on the edge of a ravenous void. Jonath let his fear take over and hammered his heels into its flanks. He ripped at the reins and turned south, piercing into the wall of black mist...

Hooked nails scoring my skin. Long-dead grimaces accusing me.

...and bursting out the other side into the clear. Ahead, the path was open. The sun was setting over the bay, the sea glittering calmly beyond the cliffs.

Behind Jonath, hollow, furnace laughter echoed through the crossroads.

“Give chase,” he heard Hecarim order.

Jonath clung to the steed, speeding down the path faster than he had ever seen any stallion gallop. In his wake, a thin trail of the unnatural mist lined the packed earth. The sun was setting into the bay, giving way to the deep blue of dusk. It had been a beautiful day for a ride; if he kept its pace, he might see another. Looking up, he saw the Protector’s Shield coming into view in the darkening sky. Jonath’s smile at the constellation turned stale as he heard the long call of a hunting horn.

His heartbeat quickened as he saw thick tendrils of mist closing in behind him. The monstrous Hecarim and his Iron Order rode within. Tendrils of darkness flanked Jonath, and he thought he could see shapes coalescing inside. His mouth fell open in horror, his vision blurring from sudden tears. He could see her nonetheless. The knight he had left to die, now a ghostly form trapped in the mist. She raised an arm that ended in a ragged stump—the hand that had held the reins, missing.

“You have no honor,” she wailed. “You are no true Demacian!”

“Please, no,” Jonath whispered, forcing his gaze ahead. He frantically kicked the steed’s flanks, willing it to get him away from this horror. He glanced down at the reins. The knight’s severed fist was gripping them, yanking the mount into a stall.

“Flee, coward,” the voice echoed from the mist.

Whimpering in anguish, Jonath ripped the reins out of the fist and threw the plated gauntlet toward the riders at his heels.

“So quick to take offense, squire,” Hecarim jeered. “I did not think you had the courage. If you are challenging me to a duel, then I accept. We noblemen have a code to follow, after all.”

Jonath raised his arm in front of his face as Hecarim closed to striking distance, but instead of being beheaded by the glaive, Jonath was engulfed once more in cloying darkness. The faces of the dead surrounded him, their scornful laughter an anthem to their twisted master’s trickery. Jonath spurred his spectral steed, and as he burst from the mist, Hecarim and the riders disappeared from view.

Night had fallen over the coast as Jonath passed the stables at the edge of Havenfall. The sound of battle had stopped, and the approaches to the town appeared largely untouched. He felt a brief wave of relief. He would find soldiers here who could fight. Commander Tyndarid and his garrison would see off the riders on Jonath’s trail—for all his imperious arrogance, the castellan was an indomitable warrior.

Jonath saw war horses, some half saddled and barded, some still tied to their hitching rails near the trough, lay dead. His heart sank.

As Jonath’s destrier carried him further into the settlement, the true horror of the black mist around him became apparent. Jonath slowly turned around. All of this... couldn’t be real. It had to be a figment of his troubled imagination, or some dark sorcery worked by a vengeful hedge mage.

But his eyes told him otherwise.

In the streets, the spirits of newly dead townsfolk lingered above their own corpses, cowering in fear, wailing silently, reliving the instant they were ridden down by the Iron Order. Proud knights of the crown stood mute where they had died battling. As Jonath passed, one by one, spirits fixed their hollow eyes on him. A knight, his killer’s spear still pinning his shield to the shade of his body, made a step toward Jonath. A gasp escaped his lips as he recognized Commander Tyndarid. A group of dead shipbuilders haltingly gained their feet and tumbled toward Jonath in agitation. He kicked his steed and made his escape. A voice inside him whispered that even in death, they knew he didn’t belong.

Wraithlike raiders coursed through the merchant quarters, corralling survivors and putting torches to the roofs of the smithies and trade posts. Green fire engulfed the buildings and cast a deathly light across the square—the thatching and wood somehow remaining untouched by the flames. The townsfolk inside... Jonath looked away as he rode, willing himself not to hear.

By the harbor, fishing boats and river barges lay low against the white-stone pier, scuttled and ablaze. Jonath looked out over the bay, his gaze drawn across the still water by the long, mournful note of a hunting horn. A squadron of spectral riders raced across the calm water in the moonlight, lowering their spears as they neared the last sailship still afloat. The charge hit home, followed by the faint clash of weapons and the cries of sailors dying. The ship disappeared from sight in a mass of writhing fog.

The entirety of Havenfall was under siege—who knew how much of Demacia was affected by this invasion.

Circling his mount, Jonath tried to control his fear and find a way out. Perhaps he should race his own steed off the pier and ride the waters across the bay. He was unable to outpace these deathless monsters, but he might slip away unnoticed and escape this terrible nightmare...

Jonath was brought back to the present by the sound of footfalls. He noticed a gaggle of survivors picking their way through the ruined market square. There were four of them. A pair of brown-haired youths, clearly siblings by their features, held on to short blades, their eyes darting fearfully across the square. They protected an elderly woman who followed in their wake, dressed in the garb of the Illuminators and carrying a steel cudgel. Jonath knew the powerfully built figure at the head of the group—it was the blacksmith Adamar. He held a heavy blade and shield, still unadorned and blackened with the soot of its forging.

“Jonath!” Adamar called out quietly. “We thought we were the last ones left alive. We’re getting away from here. You are welcome to joi—” The blacksmith fell silent as he saw Jonath’s steed. His eyes hardened with fury, and he ushered the others behind him, soot-matt shield held high. “You’re in league with these monsters!”

The old Illuminator placed a hand on Adamar’s shoulder. “Look at his eyes, Ada. He’s just as afraid as we are. He’s not with them.” She addressed Jonath directly. “Get off that abomination, child, and come with us.”

“I wish I could,” Jonath heard himself say. The guilt of his actions washed over him, making his head swim. He saw the dying knight’s face again, accusing him. “But Adamar... he’s right. I don’t belong here, and I don’t deserve your mercy. You don’t know what I did today, who I really am. I am no Demacian.”

“Enough of that. You are Jonath of Ropemaker’s Row, not some stranger. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you pray at the Protector’s shrine after dark. I know your heart wants to lead you back to righteousness. I cannot tell you if it will, but tonight all that matters is survival. There are not many of us left here, and you are one of us. One of the living. Now get off that... thing, and let us leave this place.”

Jonath grabbed the saddle, swinging his leg up to dismount. “Thank the Protector for your mercy—”

Coils of mist ripped open above the town square, spectral riders bursting forth. Hecarim was at the fore, galloping through thin air, swinging his jagged glaive wide. Before Jonath understood what he was looking at, the blade struck the Illuminator in the chest, cleaving her in two. Hecarim’s riders unceremoniously ran through Adamar and the two youths, before cantering to a halt. Like the first time Jonath saw them, they became completely still—their spears held rigidly upright, their banners and pinions frozen, only the sound of their motionless regalia piercing the deathly quiet.

Ever the first of their number, there was Hecarim, hooves scraping the ground, his animal body pacing back and forth, his eyes burning with ancient intellect. Grand Master, conqueror. Despoiler of Havenfall. How was Jonath meant to stand against the might of this infernal warmaster? How was anyone?

Hecarim closed the distance, riding up alongside Jonath until they stood shoulder to shoulder. Slowly, he reached down toward the bridle of Jonath’s borrowed steed, arresting it in place. The Grand Master was taller than Jonath by half.

“You acquitted yourself well today,” Hecarim said, the deep, furnace-roar softened to a growl. His gaze wandered, settling on the moonlit bay behind Jonath. “I have seen kings lose their minds when faced with the Black Mist and the eternal anguish that it brings. Everyone you ever knew perished this night, yet your will to survive remains unbroken. Who else are you willing to sacrifice so you can live? Are you willing to let even your liege die?”

Jonath’s heart pounded, his vision blurred as tears of helpless panic threatened to overwhelm him. Moments ago, Hecarim had slain the last survivors of his hometown, and now he was conversing with him as if they had sparred in some practice duel on the training grounds.

“The... the king is already dead. The crown prince, Protector guide his hand, is next in line, and there could be no one more deserving. I... do not want to put him in peril for my own gain.”

Hecarim remained still for a moment, then scoffed with soured mirth. “In the line of succession, the crown does not always go to the most fitting heir. And what do I care for the frail kingdoms of the living. We all have to make do with the hand fate deals us.”

Up close, Jonath could see the countless pits and scratches in Hecarim’s armor. He could see endless years of conflict scored into the black-iron plates encasing the flames that made up his body, and understood a fundamental truth about this creature... He had been created by war, and he was made for war. He had done nothing but battle for centuries, condemned to relive his worst transgressions. Whatever crimes he had committed in life, this was his punishment.

And he relished every interminable second of it.

Wherever the unnatural mist went, Hecarim and his Iron Order followed—pillaging, killing, and reveling in the atrocities they inflicted on the living. What would become of Demacia if no one stopped this evil? Jonath finally understood something that had eluded him his entire life. Courage wasn’t some unique quality infused into true Demacians at birth, or a measure of his worth to the world. It was a question of realizing what must be done, and choosing to do it no matter what. He felt calm for the first time since the crossroads. He remembered the wounded knight’s dying words, one last time.

There were no soldiers left in Havenfall to warn the crown prince, and soon there might be none left in the entire kingdom. Fixing the Grand Master with his gaze, he pulled the reins from Hecarim’s mailed fist, taking control of the destrier. Hecarim indulged him, his posture changing from introspection to curiosity.

Jonath wheeled, gaining a few paces of distance. “I have seen how you ride down defenseless villagers, reveling in the screams of the helpless. I know you are bound to your basest instincts for eternity, but there is more to you. If a shred of your living self remains, if you have any honor at all, abomination, you will let me pass!”

He collected himself. He knew he would not make it to the Great City, but he was going to try. The bulk of his tireless mount tensed as it sensed what was about to happen. With all his might, Jonath gave it the spurs, and his spectral steed charged. For the first time in his life, Jonath truly believed the words as they sprang from his lips.

“For the uncrowned king! For Demacia!”

Hecarim smirked with delight as the boy charged willingly toward the spears of the Iron Order. The folly of youth had stayed with him until death, a flaw all too common in Hecarim’s experience. But as long as Viego chased his own foolish obsession across the oceans of the world, trailing the Mist in his wake, Hecarim would enjoy the spoils of war.

Around him, as far as he could see, his riders spread terror and death. A cast-iron grin widened across his burning skull.

“If but our hands were not bound by fealty...” he mused, as he watched the last living soul of Havenfall perish.

They came at Lucian in a blur of shadow, lunging at him with insubstantial talons and ancient, rusted blades. They moved fast… but he was faster.

He moved like a dancer, turning and spinning, ever in motion, the relic pistols in his hands lighting up the rotting interior of the inn with their blazing, arcane light.

Lucian’s long leather coat and tightly bound locks whipped around him as he moved, effortlessly avoiding the frenzied attacks coming at him from every direction. Every shot he fired burned with the intensity of the sun, banishing one of the screeching spirits, sending them reeling back into formless darkness.

He took no satisfaction in this duty. Not anymore. All the light in his world had been snuffed out when she had been taken.

Dark talons raked across one of Lucian’s forearms, making him hiss in pain. Cursing himself for being momentarily distracted, he destroyed the offending spirit with a blast of light to its head, and focused upon the task at hand. Standing firm in the center of the inn, he gunned down the tide of spectral forms rushing at him, every shot lighting up the darkness.

At last he was alone, arms spread wide, weapons pointed in opposite directions, their stone tips still glowing. He glanced left and right, awaiting another attack. The fire in the inn’s hearth seemed to burn more brightly, banishing the deeper shadows, and the icy chill retreated.

Suddenly weary, Lucian righted a fallen bench and sat with a groan. He placed his pistols upon the table, then turned his attention to his wound.

Wincing, he slid the long, black glove from his left hand. The leather was unmarked, but the flesh of his forearm was blackened where ghostly talons had slashed him—almost like frostbite.

He caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, and Lucian was instantly on his feet, both pistols aimed at… a dark-haired girl, barely into her teenage years, who had emerged from her hiding place in a back storeroom.

She froze, staring up at him, eyes wide and unblinking.

“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t.”

“Shouldn’t sneak up on people,” Lucian said, lowering his guns.

He made to turn away, but caught a shadow of movement reflected in the girl’s eyes. He spun, swinging his weapons around, but this time he was not fast enough.

A wraith lunged from the receding gloom—an emaciated, insubstantial creature, swathed in shrouds. Pale, blue-green light spilled from its eye sockets and gaping mouth, and it lashed at him with talons the length of daggers.

Lucian was hurled backwards by the force of the blow, flying over the bar, some fifteen feet distant. He slammed into the wall, shattering dozens of empty liquor bottles lined up on the shelves, and fell to the floor in a shower of broken glass. His chest burned where the wraith had struck him, and an icy chill clutched at his heart, making him gasp for every breath.

He searched frantically for his weapons. He spied one, lying on the uneven floor ten paces to his left. Too far. The other had spun across the floorboards, before coming to a halt at the girl’s feet.

She picked up the ancient weapon and aimed it at the wraith, clutching it with shaking hands as the thing lunged towards her, its mouth opening impossibly wide.

“It won’t fire!” she wailed, backing away. “There’s no trigger!”

An echo of memory rose in Lucian’s mind, as sudden as a knife strike.

“But how do you fire it?” Lucian said, looking down at the exquisitely crafted weapon, a look of puzzlement on his face. “There’s no trigger.”

“It doesn’t need a trigger, my love,” said Senna, her eyes glinting with amusement. She touched him lightly on the side of his head. “The trigger is in here.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lucian.

Senna aimed her own weapon—a more elegant version of the one he held—at the target twenty feet away. Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowing. “You have to will it to fire,” she said, and the target exploded in a searing blast of yellow flame.

“Right. Will it to fire,” said Lucian, leveling his pistol at the next target. Nothing happened. He shook the pistol, and snorted, partly in frustration, and partly in bewilderment.

“It requires control,” said Senna. “It requires focus. You need to will it to fire with every fiber of your being.”

Lucian laughed and turned to Senna, one eyebrow raised. “Every fiber of my being?”

“Try it!” she urged.

He did, but couldn’t keep a smile from curling at the corners of his mouth. “I give up,” he sighed. He stepped in close to Senna, and drew her into an embrace. “How do you expect me to focus on anything else when you are near?”

Senna pushed him away, laughing. “You’re not getting out of this that easily,” she said. “Again. And actually try this time.”

The girl was backed up against a wall now, the slender relic gun—Senna’s gun—a useless weight in her hands.

“Throw it to me!” Lucian barked, darting forward.

The girl shrieked as the spirit flew toward her, and hurled the gun in Lucian’s direction. It spun end-over-end through the air, passing straight through the wraith. Lucian deftly caught it in mid-sprint, simultaneously dropping to one knee and sliding across the floorboards to scoop up his other weapon. He came to his feet with both pistols ready, and opened up.

The wraith screamed and tried desperately to escape, coiling and spinning through the air away from him, but Lucian was relentless. He dashed sideways, maintaining his strafing torrent of fire. The blazing light tore through the ghastly apparition, and its cry became piteous as its dark form dissipated, like mist beneath the rising sun.

Lucian came to a halt, though he kept the pistols raised. All was silent once more.

“Is… it gone?” the girl said.

He didn’t answer immediately, his narrowed eyes scanning the room. At last, he holstered the two guns. “It’s gone. You are safe.”

“I… I couldn’t make it fire,” the girl said, staring at the darkness. “I thought I was going to die. Like the others.”

Lucian remembered his own difficulty with the weapon—it felt so long ago now.

It requires control. It requires focus.

“I certainly have focus now, my love,” Lucian murmured, under his breath.

“Did you say something?” asked the girl.

“No,” Lucian replied. He cocked his head. The sound of rattling chains was coming from somewhere nearby. “Do you hear that?”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t hear anything.”

Lucian frowned, eyes narrow. “He taunts me, still…”

He turned to leave the inn, cursed to follow that distant, tormenting sound.

“Bolt the door,” he ordered. “And pray for dawn.”

Lucian sat on a hilltop beneath the shadow of a large banyan tree and scanned the valley below. His hands rested on his relic pistols. Fingers brushed the bronzed metalwork. The Black Mist rolled across the verdant lowlands, consuming everything in its path. The Harrowing had made landfall on the island several hours earlier.

The light of countless torches moved through the darkness. Clouds of drifting mist enveloped the area. One by one, the fires waned and extinguished, their distance too far to carry the screams of the dying.

One light remained strong. Its pallid green glow floated effortlessly through the Black Mist, seemingly unaffected. The corrupted flames of vile spirits. Lucian’s heart quickened at the sight, and a seething heat flushed his body.

He raced down the hillside, fighting for purchase on loose gravel until he reached the basin. A body lay in the tall grass. Its arms were tightly wrapped around its shoulders, its eyes wide open—inky black marbles stared at a moonless sky. He marched past and continued his pursuit.

It was the fifth body that gave him pause. The old man’s features were twisted in a rigor of pain. Robes shredded. Flesh flayed from the body. The wounds from the scythe unmistakable to the trained eye.

Lucian changed course and followed the trail of bodies to the base of a steep slope. He clambered up the rise, weaving his way through the dense thicket. The screams reached his ears before he crested the remote hilltop.

Black Mist poured across the clearing. It roiled and shifted as malformed shapes moved in the thick haze. A crowd of terrified islanders raced toward a sheer cliff drop and the ocean’s bitter promise of escape. The mist engulfed them all. Frenzied shadows descended upon the poor souls, adding the cries of the dying to the unholy chorus roaring within.

He aimed his pistols at the surging mass. A horde of screeching wraiths spewed out from the mist, charging at him with spectral blades and maws full of jagged teeth.

He fired a blaze of purifying light, immolating the cursed spirits. The blast drove him back a step, and his boot heel found the edge of the bluff. He hazarded a look over his shoulder. Stormy seas crashed against a rocky shore in the darkness below.

Laughter cut through the wails of countless souls. He spun around, weapons aimed at the approaching mist. A beacon shone inside the raging swell.

Lucian holstered one of his guns and reached inside his leather coat. He found the clay grenade and pulled it out. The fist-sized shell bore a proof mark on its rough surface—it was time to see if the old weaponsmith in Bilgewater was right.

He tossed the shell in a wide arc, and when it reached its zenith, he fired his pistol. The grenade erupted in a cloud of silver dust. The dust swirled and remained suspended in the air, creating a shimmering pocket of stillness within the deadly fog, repelling the Black Mist.

Thresh stood inside the opening, towering over a young woman. She writhed in agony as chained hooks dug into her flesh, rending soul from body. The Chain Warden lifted his ancient lantern as it started to glow. The woman’s lifeless form collapsed to the ground, and the relic accepted its new prisoner.

The specter turned to Lucian and grinned. “We missed you in Helia, and feared you'd lost your taste for defeat, shadow hunter.”

Thresh tapped the lantern. It radiated as if answering his call.

“How her soul brightens at your arrival,” Thresh said. “The promise you bring. It offers a brief respite from the misery.”

Lucian’s gaze fell on the lantern. Silver dust scattered off the protective bloom of light emanating from the iron-wrought prison. He gripped his pistols, waiting.

“Oh, but failures come with a toll,” Thresh laughed. “They make her agony so much sweeter. All those hopes dashed, like a child against the rocks.”

Lucian’s mind flashed on their last engagement, but he pushed the thought away.

“Do you know her darkest fear?” Thresh said. “Suffering until the end of all things, with you by her side.”

The light from the lantern shifted, its sickly green hue waning. He felt her reach out and embrace him in that warm and intangible way reserved for spirits and memories.

Lucian…

His heart warmed at the sound of her voice. Thresh was right. Senna could feel him every time he neared. Her reach had grown with each encounter, as if in defiance of the Chain Warden and his torments. They had sensed each other the moment he’d stepped on the island.

The lantern shuddered in Thresh’s grasp. Brilliant spirals of light swirled inside the relic, straining and swelling against the container. Thresh eyed the disturbance and simply sneered. Lucian aimed his guns at the tempest forming inside. The lantern’s protective bloom of light began to falter.

Now, my love…

Lucian fired his pistols.

The bolts of piercing light burned through the wavering defense and slammed into the iron relic. The lantern swung violently on its chain. For the first time, his purifying fire had struck the ancient prison.

Thresh roared in anger, sweeping the lantern aside.

Baneful tendrils of Black Mist erupted inside the container, overwhelming the spirals of light. The billowing shadows swallowed all semblance of his beloved and the countless souls striving for release. She was ripped away, screaming as darkness spread inside the lantern.

“No!” Lucian screamed, in chorus. “Let her go!”

Thresh laughed. A cruel and taunting howl as Senna wailed in agony.

Lucian’s pistols snapped to Thresh. He focused all his rage into the relic weapons and released a torrent of fire.

The shots engulfed the Chain Warden and ignited his spectral form in a purifying blaze. Lucian dashed forward and fired a second volley, but the shots were nulled by an envelope of darkness reemerging from the lantern.

The flames consuming Thresh died out, quenched by the dark energy. He smiled and held the lantern aloft like some prize to be claimed.

Lucian felt a heaviness press against his chest. The shots that had pierced the lantern’s defenses had been wasted. All around him silver drifted to the ground. Tendrils of Black Mist seeped into the protective hollow created by the grenade, and the opening started to close. The moment had passed, and his beloved still remained imprisoned.

Resigned, he lifted his pistols and charged into the fray.

A blur of motion whipped forward and slammed into Lucian. The chained hook sent him flying across the clearing. He hit the ground, tumbling head over heels on hard gravel until the earth gave way to nothingness, and the ocean rushed up to meet him.

It starts with the laughter… chains drag along stone… echoing in the dense haze… he always turns too slowly… pistol sweeping to meet the gleam… the blaze never erupts… he doesn’t have a shot… she’s standing there… between him and hook…

Confusion sets in her eyes… an inky blackness… she’s screaming now… her entire body contorting… falling to the ground… all her days slipping away… the piercing scream in his head… begging him to run.

Lucian bolted up and clutched his side. Pain shot through his ribs. He eased back down on the sleeping pallet and drew in ragged breaths. Staring up at wood beams and plastered ceiling, he wondered where he was.

Senna’s screams echoed through his mind. He had failed her again. And now he would need to start anew.

He probed the tightly wrapped bandages around his ribs and found dark bruising underneath. The area was tender to the touch.

Salve-drenched leaves rested on his chest. He peeled off the damp greens, revealing blackened lesions where the chained hook had found flesh.

He turned to his side, leaned on his elbow for support, and sat up. Sunlight streamed in through the slats of a window shutter, revealing a large wooden chest sitting in the dim corner of the room. A devotional altar perched on top, brimming with day-old flowers and a carved alabaster turtle. His leather coat and jerkin sat folded on a small table next to the pallet. The relic pistols rested over the clothes.

Lucian’s unsteady hand reached out for the weapons. He inspected her gun first, examining the hewn stone and bronze metalwork as she’d taught him years before. His fingers found a deep crevice gouged in the stone. A gift from their time in Ionia. He smiled and continued with his own pistol. The metal housing on the weapon gave slightly to the touch. The damage was new and would need to be repaired soon.

He stood with a groan and holstered the weapons. Then he placed his hands on his pistol grips, feeling for height and cant. The guns sat slightly askew. He readjusted and checked once more. Satisfied, he reached down for his jerkin and eased his arms through the sleeves, and then did the same with the long frock coat.

Moving to the window, he opened the wooden shutter. Sunlight streamed in from outside, along with the faint sounds of soft crying. The narrow angle offered little more than a view of a winding stream and a thicket of vegetation. It was morning, and the Harrowing had passed.

Thresh would be leagues away.

Lucian needed to reach his schooner and start the hunt again. He gave the room one last sweep and headed for the door.

A dozen bodies lay on the ground outside the house.

A young woman sat among the dead, gently cleaning the body of an old man with a washcloth. She looked up at Lucian, her almond-shaped eyes soft and swollen.

“You shouldn’t be up,” she said.

“I’m fine. Was it you that patched me up?”

She nodded. “I’m Mira,” she said. “We found you near the cove.”

“How long ago?”

“Right after dawn, when I was searching for my father.”

He glanced down at the old man at her feet.

She shook her head, a tinge of frustration in her eyes.

“It’s not him,” she said. “I should be out looking, but we don’t have enough people.”

She picked up a fresh washcloth. “If you’re feeling better, we could use the help.”

Lucian stared at the dead. They rested on beds of freshly cut fronds, some with their eyes still open—inky black marbles staring at nothing.

He turned away. “It should be family.”

It appeared she wanted to say more, but the din of commotion rose from the far end of the village. A crowd gathered around an ox-drawn cart loaded with more bodies. Mira watched the new arrivals for a moment and then hurried out.

Lucian followed at a distance while people approached from various corners of the village. They moved across the cobbled path at their own pace, some more eagerly than others.

The crowd of survivors huddled around a young man. He held a heavy walking stick and spoke in fitful gestures. “They can’t do this! They have no right!” he yelled, pounding the ground with his staff.

“What’s happened?” Mira asked.

“The Naktu are burning the bodies!”

Many in the crowd stirred with anger, joining the young man’s protests. But several other villagers broke down in anguish.

“Who are they?” Lucian asked.

“Fire worshippers,” Mira said, “from the western rim of the island.”

“They’ll burn her spirit,” cried an old man. “They’ll leave nothing for the ancestors.” Lucian could see the fear coming into Mira’s eyes.

She rushed around the wagon, frantically searching through the stacked bodies. There were a few older women among the dead, but most were young men and children. None were her father. She backed away, her face ashen.

The old man let out a mournful sob and held his head. Mira reached out and embraced the elder. She whispered in his ear, and he seemed to calm at the words.

She turned to the villagers. “We need to find our people,” she said. “Where else can we look?”

Lucian watched the crowd deliberate. Numerous suggestions were made and countered. There were too many missing and not enough survivors. Mira had fallen silent, despair on her face.

He stepped forward. “I know where you might find more.”

The lonely hilltop was silent in the light of day. The raging storm had passed. All that remained were the dead, splayed among the bristle willows and the brush.

Mira and her people spread out across the bluff and walked among the fallen. Villagers soon settled over friends and loved ones. The young man with the walking staff dropped next to a woman facedown in the gravel, his anger drained, replaced by sorrow.

Lucian turned his attention to Mira. She crouched over the body of an older woman and whispered in her ear. Perhaps it was a prayer. Lucian couldn’t tell.

She looked up at Lucian. “He’s not here,” she said.

He gazed at the field of bodies. A weight pressed against his chest. She would have saved them, or at least tried. Her kindness was a stubborn thing that wouldn’t allow her to abandon those in need.

Mira rose. “I should get her home,” she said.

Lucian reached down and gently picked up the old woman. She was delicate and brittle in his arms. He carried her to the wagon and carefully placed her on the bed of leaves sitting over the wooden planks. He lingered for a moment. Then headed out to help the others.

They worked past midday. Gathering the dead in numbers so great they threatened to spill out of the wagon bed. Lucian and Mira loaded the last of the bodies while several villagers secured them with ropes.

Lucian stepped back and reached for his side, the throbbing pain spreading to the small of his back. He'd done too much. Even though it wasn't enough. Exhausted, he sat down near the edge of the bluff and gazed at the sea. He had worked up a sweat in the morning heat.

“How are your ribs?”

“They’re fine.”

Mira sat next to him and passed him a water jug.

“Not much left,” he said, feeling its weight.

“You need it more than me.”

He set the canteen down, stood up, and peeled off his long heavy coat. The ocean breeze cooled his skin. Sitting back down, he took a slow drink of water and capped off the empty canteen.

Mira watched the ocean and said nothing for a long time. Out in the distance, a bale of sea turtles breached the surface for air and then dove back into the deep.

“Did you see it happen?” she said.

“It was over by the time I found them.”

Mira glanced down at Lucian’s pistols. “But you’ve seen it before?”

Lucian nodded.

“How does it—”

“Nothing I say is going to help you find your father.”

Mira nodded and bowed her head.

Lucian watched the waves crash on the rocks below, the waters rising with each ebb and flow. High tide would peak soon, and he’d be able to launch. He handed Mira the canteen, rose once more, and donned his overcoat.

“What’s the fastest route to the docks?”

Mira turned to point toward the western slope of the hill and found a band of men approaching. They wore dark robes and were led by a priest holding a wooden mace with a rope-bound obsidian stone.

“Stay here,” Mira said.

Lucian followed, remaining a few paces behind without saying a word.

The young man with the staff marched up to meet the band of men. Several other villagers joined him and blocked their path.

“You are east of the river,” he said.

“We are here to light a path for the dead,” said the priest.

“Those are not our ways,” Mira said, as she reached the group.

The priest laughed. “And when they rise, who will fight them? You?”

The young man clenched his staff. “You think I’ll let you burn my wife, ash eater?” he said, spitting out the words.

The priest scowled and glanced at his men. Lucian spied the man’s fingertips lightly brush the heavy mace, an unconscious tell. The man was eager to strike.

Lucian stepped forward. “The dead won’t rise,” he said. “Not if they're put down properly.”

The priest dragged his gaze over Lucian, taking full measure of the man.

In turn, Lucian bowed his head slightly. And then, in a single motion, he shifted his weight, slid opened his leather coat, and rested his hand on his pistol grip.

The priest glanced at the relic weapons and then back to Lucian’s eyes.

Lucian met his glare and waited for the tell. Even hoped for it.

Mira stepped in between, holding out her arms.

“Stop,” she said. “Let’s not add to the misery.”

She turned to the Naktu priest and his men. “One island. Two people. It’s always been so. We just want to bury our dead according to our ways.”

They all looked to the priest, but the man’s gaze remained fixed on Lucian as he considered Mira’s words. They all waited for his response.

“You can collect your dead,” he said. “East of the river.”

The crowd settled and fell back, all except for Lucian and the Naktu priest. They remained facing one another, waiting for the other to move.

“People should bury their dead as they see fit,” Lucian said.

“We need to find them first, and we can’t do that if we’re fighting,” Mira said.

Lucian remained silent. His fingertips brushed the bronzed metalwork of his pistol.

Mira gently placed her hand on his shoulder. “Please, you’re a guest here.”

Lucian nodded. “Fine. Your dead. Your call,” he said, moving his hands away from his gun. “Western trail to the docks?”

“Yes,” she said, with a heavy sigh. It seemed she wanted to say more, but she simply lowered her head.

“Hope you find your father,” he said, before turning around and walking away.

The docks sat in a sheltered cove. A lonely flotilla of ships swayed gently in the water. Lucian’s schooner was moored at the far end, among vessels laden with unloaded shipments and nets full of rotting fish.

He walked along the pier and heard the scuttling of countless beetles devouring the putrid catch sitting on the trawler next to his ship. It was his third boat, the previous ones lost to inexperience. Learning to sail had been difficult, but far easier than persuading ship captains to chase the Black Mist.

He boarded the schooner and went below deck to check his provisions. A star tracker had fallen from the rack, but otherwise, everything appeared untouched. He stowed the instrument back on its shelf and sat on his bunk.

Maps and charts from every corner of the world covered the paneled walls and ceiling. They were marked with water depths, tidal rapids, and seabed features.

He'd been tracking the Harrowing for months. His last excursion had started in Raikkon and led him south to Sudaro. That encounter had sent him racing across the vast ocean only to lose sight of the Black Mist off the coast of those accursed isles. Easterly winds had then carried him to the Serpentine Delta, where he'd finally caught up to the storm.

He pressed a tack on the map, marking one of the numerous islands of the delta. Then he attached a piece of twine to the nail and ran the string back to the marker in the Shadow Isles. That nail held more twine leading north, up toward Sudaro in Ionia. There were dozens of markers dotting the maps, creating a tapestry of the last few years.

Lucian stared at the charts, trying to discover a pattern, but all he could see were his failures scattered across Valoran. He thought of all the times he’d tried to save her and why he’d fallen short. His throat tightened at the memory of Thresh and his misspent rage.

Senna’s screams echoed through his mind.

He shut his eyes and held back the overwhelming despair until all he could hear was the sound of his own heart. Resolved, he turned to the maps and started working.

A pinch of sand still remained in the hourglass when he finished plotting the new course and was ready to cast off. His time was improving, but precise measurements were still difficult to gauge. The Black Mist didn’t answer to the wind.

He stood up from his bunk and adjusted the wrapping around his ribs. The earlier pain now a dull ache. Satisfied, he returned to the deck above and started untying the halyard line to the mainsail. Movement on the shoreline caught the corner of his eye.

Mira was combing the beach.

He watched her pick up a large gourd, shake it a few times, and toss it back on the sand. She turned in his direction and caught sight of him. He simply nodded and continued working. After a moment, she started walking toward the boat, picking up another husk off the beach as she approached.

“They’re calasa fruit,” she said, tossing it to Lucian.

He shook it, noting the sloshing of nectar inside.

“My father always brought a shipment back from Venaru. These can’t be more than a day old.”

“Where are the rest of your people?”

“Most have gone home to prepare their dead,” she said. “Others were headed to the mud caves and the lagoon, but my father was due back here when the storm hit.

“Is your father’s boat docked?” he said, returning the husk.

She shook her head and looked out to the water. A handful of capsized ships and submerged masts stood as watery markers in the shallow depths of the cove.

“Maybe your father never reached shore.”

Mira stared at the calasa fruit in her hand. “We found another ship’s captain, washed up on the beach. Her boat was nowhere to be found.”

Lucian checked the strandline; high tide wouldn’t peak for a few hours. A quick couple of loops and he resecured the halyard.

“Show me,” he said

Mira led him along the shoreline. They followed the winding rim of the cove past a rocky shoal and stopped near a bar of coral reef.

“This is where we found her.”

Lucian studied the sand and found only bits of shells and coral. He scanned the water, searching for wreckage. Calm seas stretched across the horizon.

“He was coming from Venaru?”

“They both were, they traded at the markets.”

“The storm blew in from the east. It could explain why she washed up here,” Lucian said. “Did your father usually make port before or after the other captain?”

“After,” she said, understanding coming into her eyes.

She gazed out at the ocean and took in a deep breath and let out a tremulous shudder.

“He would have been out there alone,” she said.

She bowed her head and stood there a long time, watching the water lap at her sandaled feet.

“What if he washed up on shore?” she said.

Mira lifted her head and looked toward the west. The shoreline continued for a distance before disappearing beyond the curve of the island. The answer to her question laid deep in Naktu territory.

They moved west, past grass-covered dunes and towering sea arches carved by seawater and time. The shoreline soon turned rocky and impassable, forcing them to clamber up a volcanic slope and march across a ridgeline overlooking the ocean. Far off to the south, a stone monolith rose from the water to meet the sky—the Pillar of Sorrows, the tallest point on the Island of Venaru.

Mira scanned the coastline, searching for signs of her father’s boat. She pointed to a colony of dead sea lions sprawled on the rocks below. Seagulls scurried about, picking at the bloated carcasses. Lucian nodded and continued without a word.

The pair made their way down from the ridge crest to a ravine. A river wound through the narrow valley and fed into the sea. It was the natural boundary between the island’s two people.

Mira crossed the river without saying a word.

They climbed up the next hill. Mira scaled the slope with ease, weaving her way through the dense brush while Lucian gradually fell behind. The dull ache of his ribs spread with each labored step. The wrappings had come loose, forcing him to stop halfway up the rise. He tightened the dressing and winced at the worsening pain. His breath drew deep and harsh.

He watched Mira reach the hilltop. She shielded her eyes from the sun and swept the shoreline. Then she stopped. She put her hand to her mouth and reared back a step.

Lucian scrambled up the loose gravel, using the thick branches and vines from the brush for support. He reached the crest next to Mira and peered over the edge. A broken mast was lodged between the rocks below. The remnant of its sail thrashed in the wind.

He searched beyond the debris, his gaze following the twisting coastline to a band of sand bars, down past a chain of barren islets, until it finally settled on a stretch of towering cliffs off in the distance. A colony of seagulls circled the shore.

The body lay sprawled on a boulder of volcanic rock. Thunderous waves crashed against the craggy shore, threatening to sweep it out to sea. A treacherous climb down an almost vertical slope was their only hope.

“It'll be high tide soon,” he said.

Mira didn’t answer. She simply stared at her father.

Lucian reached out and touched her arm. “Mira,” he said.

She flinched. Eyes blinking as if waking from a stupor.

“Tola vines,” she said. “We can use them to weave a rope and litter.”

He watched her head out, understanding for the first time the depth of her conviction. Lucian took in a deep breath and followed.

They harvested a batch of heavy vines from the thicket dotting the hilltop. Lucian braided the coarse strands into rope while Mira’s deft hands weaved a litter to hold the body.

Lucian secured the line to a nearby tree and tested the weight. It held firm. Satisfied, he tossed the rope and litter over the side.

“I’ll go down,” he said.

“It should be me. I’ve been climbing for years.”

“I know how to climb.”

“You were having trouble keeping up.”

“I’ll be fine.”

She shook her head, frustrated. Ears and cheeks flushed red.

“He’s too heavy,” she said. “I can guide the litter. Keep it off the rocks. But I need you to pull him up.”

Lucian looked down at the body. Broad shoulders and thickset limbs from years of battling the sea. Fifteen stone of dead weight. He nodded and handed her the rope.

She moved to the rim of the precipice and slowly backed up to the edge. After testing the rope one final time, her toes eased onto the threshold. She glanced over her shoulder, took a calming breath, and went over the side.

Lucian anxiously watched Mira inch her way down the rope—hand over fist—until she reached a toehold. A few breaths later, she spied over her shoulder, found her next target, and repeated the process.

She did this again and again until reaching a broad ledge a third of the way down the bluff. The wind had picked up, bringing along crisp ocean air. Mira stretched out her arms and shook them loose. Then she looked up at Lucian and signaled everything was fine.

Rested, she grabbed the rope and scanned for another perch. After a while, she looked back up and shook her head. There were no safe holds underneath.“I can pull you up.”

“Not yet.”

Mira studied the rockface to her right. She pointed to a narrow shelf several yards away. Reaching it would require a sideways move. Lucian nodded, then glanced at the shallow waters and jagged rocks awaiting below.

His stomach tightened as she wrapped the rope around her forearm. Then, without hesitation, she took a running start and leapt off the ledge.

Mira swung across the rockface and dropped down on the shelf. Dirt and rock crumbled beneath her feet. Her body tilted to one side, teetered on the edge, and fell.

Lucian watched Mira slide down the rope, kicking her legs for purchase. A foot lodged in the loose dirt and flipped her upside down. Her flailing arms tangled in the vines, breaking her fall in a jolting stop. She wailed in pain.

The line unraveled and she was bouncing off the rocks and into the water.

Lucian scrambled to his feet and grabbed the rope. He was frantically searching for a path down when Mira finally broke the surface.

She fought against the swell, kicking and clawing onto the craggy shore. Exhausted, she collapsed on the rocks. Her chest rising and falling rapidly.

“I’m coming down!”

Mira raised a shaky hand and waved him off.

Gradually, her breathing settled, and she sat up. She stared at her father’s body for a long time. Her hand reached out. She gently stroked his hair. Then she turned him over, laid her head on his chest, and wept.

Lucian looked away, adrift in his own memories, knowing she could remain there forever, anchored to despair.

After some time, she stood up and reached for the litter. He watched her shut away the overwhelming grief and become the dutiful daughter. It was the only way to prepare for the finality of death. She gently pushed the body onto its side, placed the vine-woven stretcher underneath, and rolled it into place. Once secured, she gave the signal to lift.

Lucian grabbed the rope and pulled, hoisting the body while Mira climbed alongside, guiding the litter and keeping it from slamming against the rocks. It wasn’t long before he worked up a sweat, and the dull ache in his side started to sharpen.

The pain worsened with each heave of the rope. It spread across his side until his arms trembled, and the rope slipped. He clutched the vines and wrapped them around a dry stump.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yeah… Hold on,” he said, struggling for breath.

The pain subsided. He glanced over the edge. The litter dangled halfway down the slope. Mira waited nearby, straddling a pair of rocky outcroppings jutting from the cliff face.

Lucian untied the rope and worked slowly and deliberately, bracing himself with each heave before walking his hands down the vines and pulling again. He built up a rhythm like an oarsman and made steady progress.

His ribs spasmed, and his grip failed.

Mira yelled down below.

Lucian fought for air as the rope slipped through his hands. He clenched the coarse vines, searing flesh until his grip finally locked. The deadweight yanked him several feet toward the edge.

He kicked out his feet, gouging twin trenches as the heels of his boots dug into the soft dirt and slid to a stop. Trembling arms strained against the weight. He pulled until the joints in his shoulders threatened to pop. But the litter refused to budge.

The pain in his ribs flared, building to another spasm. He squeezed the corded vine and glanced to his left and right, searching for something, anything, to tie down the rope. There was nothing, there was only him.

He looked out at the sea as his hands started to cramp. His beloved was imprisoned somewhere beyond the horizon. If his journey ended here, his promise would remain unkept. The price was too high.

Lucian shook his head and eased his grip. The rope slipped an inch.

No sooner had he done it than a tightness clutched his chest. She would have never let go of the rope, her stubbornness would have kept her faithful to the young woman below. Especially after all she had risked to find her father.

Desperate, and with nothing left to give, Lucian wound the vines around his forearm just as his grip failed. The rope tightened like a snare around a rabbit and wrenched him forward. He drove his heels into the dirt again, but it was no use. The weight of the dead was dragging him toward the drop.

A blooddrenched hand rose from below and clawed the edge of the cliff. A moment later, Mira hauled herself up, rolled to Lucian’s side, and grabbed the rope. Together they pulled until the body reached the top.

They saw the fires shortly after dark. Lucian and Mira dragged the litter down from the ridge crest, watching dozens of pyres roar to life in the valley below.

The pair stopped to rest beneath the canopy of a banyan tree. Lucian sat and probed his bruised ribs, adjusting the freshly wrapped bindings. Mira gazed at the flames. She exhaled a shuddering breath and wiped the corners of her eyes.

“Your hands,” Lucian said.

She regarded her bandaged palms. A spot of crimson stained the dressing.

“They’re fine.”

“They’re bleeding again. Let me see.”

She held out her hands while Lucian carefully unwrapped the bandages. The rope burns on her palms were slick with blood. He tensed, resentful of all the suffering Mira and her people had endured.

He popped the stopper on his water flask and washed the loose skin where the blisters had burst. Then he cut a fresh length of cloth and redressed the wounds.

“They burn the body and spirit. There’s nothing left,” she said, watching the fires in the distance, her gaze fixed and unwavering.

Lucian didn’t understand their beliefs, but he understood promises to the dead.

“We should get moving,” he said.

Lucian and Mira each grabbed a length of rope and slung it across their shoulders. They pulled in unison, setting the heavy litter into motion, and moved out. Gravel crunched beneath their feet as they trudged up the slope.

They heard the chanting before reaching the crest.

Lucian signaled Mira to stay low and led them to a thicket. The heavy brush provided cover as they scanned the valley and spotted a party of Naktu gathered near the riverside.

They stood shrouded in the shadows of a tree, but Lucian recognized the priest. The man raised his heavy mace, and the obsidian stone began pulsating a bright vermilion. The soft glow revealed a body lying in the grass by the bank. It burst into flames.

The Naktu’s chant rose as the pyre burned brighter. The priest lowered his staff, and the light from the stone waned. The group fell silent.

Lucian drew his pistols.

“What are you doing?” Mira said.

“Ending this.”

She shook her head. “It’s already done.”

He looked past her and started heading out. Mira reached for his arm.

“Why?” she said, her eyes pleading. “Even if you killed all of them, those people would still be ash.”

The Naktu marched along the river bank and gathered around another body.

“They’re east of the river,” he said.

“I know where they are!” she said, her voice loud and defiant. She stepped back and threw up her arms. “You think I don’t want to do something? They’re my people!”

She gazed down at the litter holding her father. Her eyes started to well.

“But… I can’t…” she said, voice trembling. “I need to get my father home. He’s all that matters. Not the Naktu, or what they’ve done. Only him.”

Mira didn’t wait for a response. She bent down to pick up the ropes to the litter and slung them over her shoulders. Leaning forward, she strained against the weight, trying to get the body moving. The litter finally shifted on the rough gravel, and she slowly pulled away, alone.

The Naktu chanting started anew.

He glared down at the men as they gathered around another body. The priest raised his staff and ignited the pyre. Rage flushed through Lucian, but Mira’s words resonated in his head. The anger slowly ebbed. All that remained was a mournful resignation. He holstered his weapons and rejoined Mira.

It was past midnight by the time Lucian and Mira reached the village. Hushed whispers and lingering gazes followed as they arrived at the empty house. Exhausted, the pair unslung the ropes to the litter and sat outside the door. Torch lights burned inside a few nearby homes, but most sat dark and silent.

“We should take him inside,” Mira said.

They cleared the front room and laid out the body on a bed of fronds. Mira poured water into a pot, placed it over the irons, and lit a fire. Warmth bathed the room.

Mira sat on the floor next to her father.

“This is Lucian, Pappa,” she said. “He helped bring you home.”

His stomach clenched at the words. He had faltered at the hilltop. It was only Mira’s resolve that had kept them faithful and carried them until the end.

She gently unfastened the seashell buttons on his tunic and opened the frayed and worn garment. She let out a sob. Blackened wounds marred his arms and chest. Her trembling hand reached out to undo the rest of his clothes. But she stopped short, eyes shimmering and distant.

“I can—?” Lucian offered.

“Please,” she whispered.

He nodded and stared down at the body. The man’s final moments were etched on his flesh. They told of unspeakable horrors and the agonizing end.

A floodgate of memories opened and threatened to drown him in grief. He pushed the thoughts away and focused on the meager solace he could offer.

Lucian removed the man’s boots and untied the cord on his trousers. He tried to roll them off, but seawater had tightened the leather. He produced a dagger from inside his coat. Mira nodded. He cut the woven leg seams and removed the sheared garment.

Mira retrieved the pot from the fire and added camphor oil to the water. A sweet fragrance rose with the steam.

They cleaned the body with linen washcloths, gently scrubbing away dirt and salt and all the impurities natural to the dead. Mira held her father’s hand, taking great care to clean beneath the fingernails. When they were done, she embraced her father tenderly, her eyes shimmering pools of love and sorrow.

Mira stood and went to an adjoining room, and returned with a silver hairpin decorated with agate and coral. She placed the pin in her father’s hands and laid them across his chest.

“It was my mother’s. She gave it to him on their bonding day.”

Lucian glanced at the relic weapon in his left holster. Her pistol, its bronzed metalwork more elegant and intricate than his own.

“She died before my first summer,” she said. “He feared too many years had passed. That he’d grown too old and she wouldn’t recognize him when his time came.”

Mira shuddered, and a wistful laugh escaped her lips. “I always thought it was foolish,” she said, her eyes smiling. “Of course she would know him, and guide him home.”

He thought of the countless souls imprisoned by the Black Mist. Her father now likely among them, tormented and suffering. He didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth.

“You kept your faith. That’s all that matters,” he said.

Mira remained silent for a long time before finally speaking.

“Is that why you chase the mist, to keep a promise?”

He shifted his body and leaned back. “It took everything from me.”

“So its revenge you’re after?”

Lucian stared at the fire. “It’s different when you see it…” he said.

Mira glanced at her father.

They fell into a deep silence, both lost in their own thoughts. The fire crackled in the hearth and broke the stillness. Mira spoke first.

“I wasn’t there… I don’t know how it was for him… for any of them,” she said, her voice tremulous and soft. “But vengeance isn’t going to bring them back.”

She wiped the corners of her eyes and turned her attention back to her father.

Lucian’s gaze fell to his hands. They rested on his pistols, fingertips brushing the hammered bronze.

He thought of all the times he’d tried to save her and all the reasons he’d failed. All these years, he believed he was beyond vengeance, but the words kept turning in his head.

Thresh’s laughter echoed in his mind, drowning out everything… even her voice.

He shut his eyes and silently repeated the mantras he’d learned so long ago. “Carve away the unwanted. Keep only the stone… Carve away the unwanted. Keep only the stone…”

But the ritual failed to silence the laughter or steady his hands. He gripped the pistols until his fingers ached and all he could hear was the beat of his own heart.

The memories unfolded. From the moment he’d lost her, so many years ago, to his last failed attempt. They all rushed his mind in blinding flashes and deafening roars. His heart raced. He struggled for breath as he witnessed every gut-wrenching scream… every sadistic laugh… and every rage-filled charge. The pattern he’d sought finally resolved in his mind.

A heaviness pressed on his chest as he saw the truth. His anger let him hold on to her. It kept her memory alive without plunging him into a bottomless well of despair. To abandon that rage was to be unfaithful. And yet, it was anger that kept him from putting his beloved to rest. He had promised to bring her peace, but all he had done was add to her misery.

He’d been failing her since the day she died.

Lucian had watched the burial from the deck of his ship. Mira and her people had carried their loved ones on doolies of carved turtle shells. The bodies wrapped tightly in white linen. They were buried at dawn in a deep communal pit on the sandy shore.

“They will be reborn and return to the sea where the ancestors will guide them home,” Mira had said.

Lucian prepared to cast off. He untied the halyard and pulled on the line, hoisting his mainsail. The canvas ran up the mast and unfurled in the wind. He was cleating the line when he saw Mira approaching. He waved her over.

“It was a good ceremony,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”

Lucian nodded and gazed out to sea, the ocean calm across the horizon.

“Still chasing the mist?” she said.

He shook his head. “Going to bury my dead.”

Mira offered a wan smile. “Maybe after you’re done, you can come back. There’s a place for you here.”

“Perhaps,” he said, but he didn’t believe so.

Lucian watched her stride back toward the shore. She stopped to pick up a ripe gourd, shook it a few times, and kept going, fruit in hand. When she reached the treeline and the path leading to her village, she turned and waved.

Lucian waved back, knowing he would never return.

The Shadow Isles would be the final leg of his journey. No need for another tack or string of twine. He would carve away the anger and keep his promise. All that mattered was putting her to rest. In his heart, he knew it would be his final deed. He hoped to hear her voice one last time.

If he were truly fortunate, she would be there to guide him home.

From an early age, Lucian wanted nothing more than to be like his father, Urias, who was a member of the ancient order of the Sentinels of Light. While Lucian remained home in Demacia, Urias ranged far and wide, protecting the living from the wraiths of the Black Mist.

Urias would regale Lucian with tales of his adventures, where courage and ingenuity carried the day. Lucian hung on every word, picturing himself saving the people of Runeterra at his father’s side. But Urias did not want his son to follow in his footsteps, hoping to keep his family safe from the dangerous life he had chosen.

Lucian waited for the day he would become Urias’ apprentice, but it never came.

Instead, Lucian stayed in Demacia, where he found himself increasingly at odds with the kingdom’s culture. It especially rankled him that Demacia would exile peaceful mages to the hinterlands. Lucian found fulfillment in safeguarding the banished on their perilous journey. Where his countrymen saw only outlaws, reducing the world to good or evil, Lucian looked closer, and saw people in need of help.

After returning home from one such journey, Lucian found a stranger waiting at his door. She introduced herself as Senna, a Sentinel of Light. Cradling Urias’ relic pistol in her hands, Senna explained that Lucian’s father had died, falling in battle against the the long-dead wraiths of the Black Mist.

Senna had been Urias’ apprentice, fighting at his side for years.

Lucian reeled in shock—not only was his father dead, but before him stood a woman who had lived the life he had wanted for so long. As Senna made to take her leave, Lucian stopped her at the door, insisting he join her. He knew what came next—the vigil for lost Sentinels. Senna reluctantly allowed Lucian to accompany her.

Along the way, the two traded stories of their time with Urias, Senna comforting Lucian with her plainspoken wisdom, and Lucian easing her pain with fond remembrances. They arrived at Urias’ birthplace, far away from Demacian lands. There, they held the vigil for lost Sentinels.

As they prepared to depart, dark clouds rolled in over the coast, and wraiths manifested from the foulness, attacking them. Where Lucian was horrified, Senna drew her weapons with a grim familiarity—this was her curse. Since she was a child, tendrils of the Black Mist had stalked her wherever she went, unleashing its horror should she tarry anywhere for too long.

As Senna fought one of the creatures, it clawed Urias’ pistol from her grip. Lucian retrieved it, sensing his fate opening up before him. The blazing sorrow in his heart manifested in a bolt of light that blasted from the pistol, distracting the wraith so Senna could banish it. Senna fought off the remaining spirits before the pair left, the Mist ever on her trail.

Never before had one of the uninitiated fired a Sentinel’s relic weapon. For the first time, Lucian had shown Senna his potential to join the order.

Eventually, Senna entrusted Lucian with his father’s pistol, and instructed him in the tactics and doctrines of the Sentinels. He proved himself worthy of the lessons. A bond slowly formed between them, Lucian’s warmth and charm the perfect balance to Senna’s discipline and unbreakable resolve.

Lucian and Senna battled the myriad evils that ushered forth from the Black Mist, and their reliance upon each other blossomed into love. The closer Lucian grew to Senna, the more he witnessed the curse she bore. Each conflict hardened him, splitting the world apart into light and shadow, good and evil. Lucian’s urge to heal Senna became a crusade he pursued with reckless zeal.

Scouring a forgotten vault for a cure, the two Sentinels were attacked by the monstrous wraith Thresh. The ghoulish Chain Warden was a dangerous foe, and when Senna called to withdraw and regroup, Lucian refused to turn back. Throwing himself blindly into the attack, Lucian realized his mistake as Thresh gained the upper hand. Senna stepped into Thresh’s path, imploring Lucian to run.

As the dust settled, Senna lay dead before him, her soul claimed by Thresh’s eldritch lantern.

Senna’s sacrifice was nearly Lucian’s undoing. For years, he stalked Runeterra, a husk of the man he once was, his former warmth replaced with anger and bitterness. Wielding both his pistol and Senna’s, Lucian hunted Thresh in the hope of destroying the lantern and granting oblivion to his captive love. On the day that battle finally came, Lucian shattered the lantern—but instead of finding her eternal rest, Senna reemerged.

Lucian and Senna’s love is a bond even death could not sever. As Lucian struggles to grasp Senna’s altered form, he is forced to confront his own. Lucian now fights to return to his former self, while grappling with the reality that the dark forces he hates are all that keep Senna with him.

While Senna has returned with knowledge of a new mission, Lucian remains obsessed with exacting vengeance from Thresh, as he is certain the Chain Warden’s machinations have only begun.

The Butcher Blades had hung the Jackdaw from a rusted marlinspike through his jawbone and left him for the quayside scavengers. This was the seventeenth murdered ganger the hooded man had seen tonight.

A slow night by Bilgewater's standards.

At least since the Corsair King had fallen.

Red-fanged wharf rats had already eaten most of the hanged man's feet and were perched on stacked kreels to tear at the soft meat of his calves.

The hooded man kept on walking.

“Help. Me.”

The words were wet, squeezed up through a throat clogged with blood. The hooded man spun, hands reaching towards the weapons slung on his wide belt.

Incredibly, the Jackdaw was still alive on the bone-handled spike. The Hooks stuck it deep into the wooden frame of a loading crane. No way to get the Jackdaw down without tearing his skull to splinters.

“Help. Me,” he said again.

The hooded man paused, considering the Jackdaw's request.

“What for?” he said at last. “Even if I get you down from there, you will be dead by morning.”

The Jackdaw carefully lifted his hand to a concealed pocket in his patchwork jerkin and removed a golden Kraken. Even in the dim light, the hooded man saw it was genuine.

The scavengers hissed and raised their hackles as he approached. Wharf rats weren't large, but meat as warm as this wasn't a prize to be surrendered lightly. They bared long, needle-like fangs, spitting diseased gobbets of saliva.

He kicked one rat out over the water. He crushed a second underfoot. They snapped and bit, but nimble footwork kept any from tasting his flesh, his every movement smooth and precise. He killed another three before the rest scattered to the shadows, sullen eyes glaring red in the darkness.

The hooded man stood beside the Jackdaw. His features were hidden, but the light of a rogue’s moon suggested a face that no longer smiled.

“Death is here for you,” he said. “Embrace it, safe in the knowledge I will ensure it is final.”

He reached into his coat and withdrew a glittering spike of silver. Two handspans long and engraved with curling symbols spiraling along its length, it resembled an ornate, leather-worker's awl. He placed the tip under the dying man's chin.

The man's eyes widened and his hand scrabbled at the hooded man's sleeve as he looked out over the vast expanse of ocean. The sea was a black mirror shimmering with the glow of myriad candles, quayside braziers and lamplight warped through salvaged glass from a thousand cliffside-hulks.

“You know what lurks over the horizon,” he said. “You know the horror it brings. And yet you tear at each other like rabid beasts. It makes no sense to me.”

He turned and hammered the heel of his palm against the flattened haft of the awl, driving the spike up into the man's brain. A last corpse rattle and the Jackdaw's pain ended. The gold coin fell from the dead man's fingers and rolled into the ocean with a soft splash.

The man withdrew the spike and wiped it clean on the Jackdaw's ragged shirt. He returned it to the sheath inside his coat and removed a golden needle and a length of silver thread dipped in waters drawn from an Ionian spring.

Working with the skill of one who had performed this service many times before, he sewed the man's eyes and lips shut. As he worked, he spoke words taught to him a lifetime ago, words first ill-spoken by a long dead king.

“Now the dead cannot claim you,” he said as he finished his work and replaced his implements.

“Maybe not, but we ain't leaving empty-handed, sure we ain't,” said a voice behind the hooded man.

He turned and pulled back his hood to reveal skin the color and texture of aged mahogany, cheekbones that were angular and patrician. His dark hair was bound in a long scalp-lock and eyes that had seen horror beyond measure surveyed the newcomers.

Six men. Dressed in aprons of blood-stiffened leather cut to display limbs of corded muscle wrapped with tattooed thorns. Each carried a serrated hook and wore belts hung with a variety of meat-workers’ knives. Petty thugs made bold by the fall of the tyrant who'd ruled Bilgewater with an iron fist. With him gone, the city was in chaos as rival gangs sought to carve out fresh territories.

Their approach hadn’t been stealthy. Hobnailed boots, offal-stench and muttered curses had announced their presence long before they'd revealed themselves.

“I don't mind a coin going to the Bearded Lady, sure I don't,” said the biggest of the Butchers, a man with a gut so prodigious it was a wonder he could get close enough to a carcass to gut it at all. “But one of ours killed Old Knock John there, fair and square, sure they did. So that gold serpent there was ours.”

“Do you want to die here?” asked the man.

The fat man laughed.

“You know who you're talking to?”

“No. Do you?”

“Go on then, tell me so I can carve it on the rock I'll use to sink your bones.”

“My name is Lucian,” he said, whipping back his long frock coat and drawing a pair of pistols wrought of knapped stone and burnished metals unknown to even the most reckless alchemists of Zaun. A bolt of coruscating light punched the fat Butcher from his feet with a scorched hole where his grotesquely swollen heart had been.

Lucian's second pistol was smaller, more finely crafted, and fired a searing line of yellow fire that cut another of the Butchers in half from collarbone to groin.

Like the wharf rats before, they fled, but Lucian picked them off one by one. Each burst of light was a killing shot. In the blink of an eye all six Butchers lay dead.

He sheathed his pistols and pulled the coat back around him. Others would be drawn by the sound and fury of his work, and he had no time to save these men’s souls from what was coming.

Lucian sighed. It had been a mistake to stop for the Jackdaw, but perhaps the man he had once been was not entirely lost. A memory threatened to surface and he shook his head.

“I cannot be him again,” said Lucian.

He isn't strong enough to kill the Chain Warden.

Olaf’s frostscale hauberk was covered in blood and viscera. He grunted as he swung his axe one-handed. Bone sheared and muscle parted before the weapon, its blade quenched on a bed of True Ice deep in the farthest reaches of the Freljord.

Bearing a spitting torch in one hand, he waded through the dripping innards of the Krakenwyrm, hewing deeper with every swing. It had taken him three hours to reach this far; cleaving through its enormous glistening organs and dense bones.

True, the beast was already dead, skewered a week ago after a month’s long chase down from the north. Over thirty harpoons cast by strong arms and broad backs from the deck of Winter's Kiss pierced its scaled hide, but it had been Olaf's spear that finally ended its fight.

Killing the beast in the heart of a churning storm outside Bilgewater had been exhilarating, and for one brief moment – as the ship heeled over and almost tossed him into the beast's maw – he'd thought this might be the moment he would achieve the glorious death he sought.

But then Svarfell the helmsman, curse his mighty shoulder, centered the rudder to right the ship.

And, sadly, Olaf had lived. Another day closer to the terror of dying peacefully in his bed as a greybearded ancient.

They'd berthed in Bilgewater, hoping to sell the carcass and strip it of battle trophies; vast teeth, black blood that burned like oil, and titanic rib-bones fit to roof his mother’s hall.

His fellow tribesmen, exhausted from the hunt, were sleeping aboard Winter's Kiss, but Olaf, ever impatient, could not rest. Instead, he took up his glittering axe and set to work in dismembering the colossal monster.

Finally he saw the beast’s inner maw, a ribbed gullet large enough to swallow a clan whole or crush a thirty-oar Longreaver in a single bite. Its teeth were chiseled fangs like obsidian boulders.

Olaf nodded. “Yah. Fit to ring a hearth circle of the wind-walkers and the readers of bones and ash.”

He jammed the spiked base of the torch into the meat of the Krakenwyrm’s flesh and set to work, hacking at the jawbone until a tooth came loose. Hooking the axe to his belt, Olaf lifted it clear and set it upon his shoulder, grunting at the enormous weight.

“Like a Frost Troll gathering ice for his lair,” he said, making his way out of the beast’s innards, wading knee-deep in blood and caustic digestive juices.

Eventually he emerged from the giant wound in the Krakenwyrm’s rear and drew in a lungful of slightly fresher air. Even after the innards of the beast, Bilgewater was a rank soup of smoke and sweat and dead things. Its air was heavy with the smell of too many people living packed together like swine in a midden.

He spat a rank mouthful and said, “The sooner I am in the north the better.”

The air of the Freljord was so sharp it could cut you to the bone. Every breath here tasted of rancid milk and spoiled meat.

“Hey!” shouted a voice over the water.

Olaf squinted through the gloom, seeing a lone fisherman rowing out to sea beyond a line of floating water markers hung with dead birds and bells.

“That beast just shit you out?” shouted the fisherman.

Olaf nodded and said, “I had no gold to pay passage on a ship, so I let it swallow me in the Freljord and bear me south.”

The fisherman grinned and drank from a cracked bottle of blue glass. “I’d sit and listen to that tall tale, right enough!”

“Come to the Winter’s Kiss and ask for Olaf,” he shouted. “We’ll share a keg of Gravöl and honor the beast with songs of doom.”

The air around the White Wharf usually smelled of gull-crap and rotten fish. Today it tasted of scorched meat and woodsmoke, a flavor with which Miss Fortune was coming to associate with ever more of Gangplank’s men dying. Ash darkened the sky and reeking fumes drifted westwards from burning vats of rendered leviathan blubber on the Slaughter Docks. Miss Fortune's mouth felt greasy, and she spat onto the crooked timbers of the wharf. The water below was scummed with residue expelled by the thousands of corpses sunk beneath the water over the years.

“You and your men had a busy night,” she said, nodding toward the smoke rising from the western cliffs.

“Aye, that we did,” agreed Rafen. “Plenty more of Gangplank’s men going under today.”

“How many did you get?” asked Miss Fortune.

“Another ten of his Cragside lads,” said Rafen. “And the Boneyard Scallys won’t be bothering us again.”

Miss Fortune nodded in approval and turned to look at the ornate bronze cannon laid on the quayside.

Jackknife Byrne lay inside the barrel, finally dead from the gutshot he'd taken on the day everything changed; the day the Dead Pool exploded in full view of Bilgewater.

A gunshot meant for her.

Now it was time for Byrne to go down among the dead men and she owed it to him to be there to see him go under. Around two hundred men and women had come to pay their respects; her own lieutenants, Byrne's old gang members, and strangers she thought might be former crewmen or curious gawkers hoping to see the woman who'd brought down Gangplank.

Byrne said he'd once run his own ship, a two-masted brigantine that was the terror of the Noxian coast, but she only had his word for that. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn't, but in Bilgewater, more often than not the truth was far stranger than any tale spun by the city’s many chanty-men.

“I see you got them fighting each other out on the Slaughter Docks as well,” said Miss Fortune, brushing particles of ash from her lapels. Long red hair spilled from beneath a tricorn hat and gathered on the shoulders of her formal frock coat.

“Yeah, wasn’t hard to turn the Rat Town Dogs and Wharf Kings against each other,” said Rafen. “Ven Gallar's always had his eye on that patch. Says Travyn's boys took it from his old man a decade ago.”

“That true?”

“Who knows?” said Rafen. “Don’t matter, no-how. Gallar would say anything to get control of that part of the docks. I just helped him along.”

“Not much left to control over there now.”

“No,” agreed Rafen with a grin. “They pretty much killed the hell out of each other. Don't reckon we'll get trouble from either of them gangs any time soon.”

“Another week like this and there won't be any of Gangplank’s people left alive.”

Rafen gave her a strange look and Miss Fortune pretended not to notice.

“Come on, let's get Byrne sunk,” said Miss Fortune.

They walked over to the cannon, ready to roll it into the sea. A forest of wooden markers dotted the scummed surface of the water, ranging from simple wooden discs to elaborate sculptures of sea wyrms.

“Anyone want to say anything?” said Miss Fortune.

Nobody did, and she nodded to Rafen, but before they could tip the cannon into the water, a booming voice echoed over the wharf.

“I bring words for him.”

Miss Fortune turned to see a giant of a woman clad in colorful robes and acres of fabric striding down the docks towards them. A posse of tattooed menfolk accompanied her; a dozen youths armed with tooth-bladed spears, wide-mouthed pistols and hooked clubs. They swaggered like the cocksure gangers they were, standing with their priestess like they owned the docks.

“Seven hells, what's she doing here?”

“Did Illaoi know Byrne?”

“No. She knows me,” said Miss Fortune. “I heard that her and Gangplank used to...you know?”

“Really?”

“So the scuttlebutt goes.”

“By the Bearded Lady, no wonder Okao's men have been giving us such a hard time these last few weeks.”

Illaoi carried a heavy stone sphere that looked as if it weighed about as much as the Syren's anchor. The towering priestess carried it everywhere she went, and Miss Fortune assumed it was some kind of totem. What everyone else called the Bearded Lady, they called something virtually unpronounceable.

Illaoi produced a peeled mango from somewhere and took a bite. She noisily chewed the fruit with her mouth open and looked down the barrel of the cannon.

“A Bilgewater man deserves a blessing of Nagakabouros, yes?”

“Why not?” said Miss Fortune. “He's going down to meet the goddess, after all.”

“Nagakabouros doesn't live in the depths,” said Illaoi. “Only foolish paylangi think that. Nagakabouros is in everything we do that moves us along our path.”

“Yeah, how stupid of me,” said Miss Fortune.

Illaoi spat the fibrous mango pit into the water and swung the stone idol around like a giant cannonball, holding it up in front of Miss Fortune.

“You're not stupid, Sarah,” said Illaoi with a laugh. “But you don't even know what you are, what you've done.”

“Why are you really here, Illaoi? Is this about him?”

“Ha! Not even a little bit,” snorted Illaoi. “My life is for Nagakabouros. A god or a man? What choice is that?”

“None at all,” said Miss Fortune. “Bad luck for Gangplank.”

Illaoi grinned, exposing a mouthful of pulped mango.

“You're not wrong,” she said with a slow nod, “but you still don't hear. You let a razor-eel off the hook and you ought to stamp on its neck and walk away before it sinks its fangs into you. Then your motion will be gone forever.”

“What does that mean?”

“Come and see me when you figure it out,” said Illaoi, holding out her hand. Nestled in her palm was a pendant of pink coral arranged in a series of curves radiating from a central hub like a single, unblinking eye.

“Take it,” said Illaoi.

“What is it?”

“A token of Nagakabouros to guide you when you’re lost.”

“What is it really?”

“Nothing more than I say.”

Miss Fortune hesitated, but too many people were gathered for her to openly offend a priestess of the Bearded Lady by refusing her gift. She took the pendant and removed her tricorn to loop the leather thong around her neck.

Illaoi leaned in to whisper.

“I don’t think you're stupid,” she said. “Prove me right.”

“Why do I care what you think?” said Miss Fortune.

“Because a storm is coming,” said Illaoi, nodding at something over Miss Fortune's shoulder. “You know the one, so you best be ready to turn your prow into the waves.”

She turned and kicked Byrne's cannon from the dock. It splashed down hard and sank in a froth of bubbles before the fatty surface residue reformed, leaving only its bobbing marker cross to indicate who was below.

The priestess of the Bearded Lady marched back the way she had come, towards her temple in the cliff-crater, and Miss Fortune turned her gaze out to sea.

A storm was brewing way out in the deep ocean, but that wasn't where Illaoi had been looking.

She'd been looking towards the Shadow Isles.

Nobody ever fished Bilgewater Bay at night.

Piet knew why, of course; he’d known these waters all his life. The currents were treacherous, hull-splitting rocks lurked just below the surface, and the seabed was littered with the wrecks of ships whose captains had not accorded the sea its proper respect. But, more importantly, everyone knew the spirits of those drowned at sea were lonely and wanted others to join them.

Piet knew all this, but still needed to feed his family.

With Captain Jerimiad’s ship burned to cinders in the crossfire between Gangplank and Miss Fortune, Piet had no work and no coin to pay for food.

He’d drunk half a bottle of Scuttler’s Scrumpy just to pluck up the courage to push his boat out onto the water tonight, and the prospect of sharing a drink with the giant Freljordian helped steady his nerves.

Piet took another slug from the bottle, tugging the scruff of hair on his chin, then pouring a measure over the side to honor the Bearded Lady.

Warmed and numbed by the liquor, Piet rowed past the warning buoys and their dead birds until he came to a stretch of ocean where he’d had some luck the previous night. Jeremiad always said he had a nose for where the fish were biting, and he had a feeling they’d be gathering where the remains of the Dead Pool had drifted.

Piet pulled in the oars and stowed them before finishing off the Scrumpy. Then, making sure to leave a last mouthful in the bottle, he tossed it out to sea. With tired, drink-addled fingers he baited his hooks with grubs he’d scooped from a dead man’s eye and tied his lines to the gunwale cleats.

He closed his eyes and bent over the side of the boat, placing both hands in the water.

“Nagakabouros,” he said, hoping that using the natives’ name for the Bearded Lady might grant him a bit of luck, “I ain’t asking for much. Please help this poor fisherman and spare him a few morsels from your larder. Watch over me and keep me safe. And if I die in your embrace, keep me down among the dead men.”

Piet opened his eyes.

A pale face stared back at him, wavering just below the surface. It shimmered with cold, lifeless light.

He cried out and jerked back into his boat as, one by one, his fishing lines were pulled taut. They spun his boat around as thin coils of mist rose from the water. The mist thickened swiftly and soon the light from Bilgewater’s cliffs was lost to the darkness as coal-dark fog rolled in from the sea.

A cacophony of once-dead birds squawked from the warning markers, followed by the clamor of bells as their convulsing bodies swung the buoys back and forth.

The black mist...

Piet scrambled for his oars, fumbling in terror to fit them to the rowlocks. The mist was numbingly cold, and lines of necrotic black threaded his skin at its touch. He wept as the grave’s chill frosted his spine.

“Bearded Lady, Mother Below, Nagakabouros,” he sobbed. “Please guide me home. Please, this I beg of-”

Piet never finished his plea.

A pair of hook-headed chains erupted from his chest, droplets of vividly red blood streaming from their tips. A third hook punched through his belly, another his throat. A fifth and sixth gouged his palms and pulled them down hard, pinning Piet to his boat.

Agony surged through him and he screamed as a figure of purest malice emerged from the black mist. Emerald fire haloed its horned skull, and sockets gouged by vengeful spirits burned as they savored his pain.

The dead spirit was robed in ancient black vestments, and rusted keys scraped at its side. A chained corpse-lantern moaned and swayed with monstrous appetite from its clenched fist.

The glass of the infernal lantern opened to receive him, and Piet felt his spirit tear loose from the warmth of his flesh. The wails of tortured souls shrieked from its depths, maddened by their unending purgatory. Piet fought to keep his spirit within his body, but a spectral blade scythed and his time in the world was ended as the glass of the lantern snapped shut.

“A wretched soul you are,” said the reaper of his life, its voice like gravel on a tombstone. “But only the first to be claimed by Thresh this night.”

The black mist rippled, and the silhouettes of malefic spirits, howling wraiths and ghostly horsemen swelled within.

The darkness boiled across the sea and swept onto land.

And the lights in Bilgewater started to go out.

Miss Fortune snapped the barrels of her pistols shut and laid them down on the table next to her short-bladed sword. Scores of frantic bells and shouts of alarm echoed from the panicked city below; she knew well what they signified.

The Harrowing.

In defiance of the incoming storm, she’d kept the shuttered windows of her newly-acquired villa open, daring the dead to come for her. Muttering winds carried their hunger and a cold that settled bone-deep.

Perched high on Bilgewater’s eastern cliffs, the villa had once belonged to a hated gang leader. In the chaos of Gangplank’s fall, he’d been dragged from his bed and had his brains bashed out on the cobbles.

Now it belonged to Miss Fortune, and she’d be damned if she’d go the same way. She reached up and ran a fingertip around the curves of the pendant Illaoi had given her at Byrne’s sinking. The coral was warm to the touch, and though she didn’t truly believe in what it represented, it was a pretty enough bauble.

The door to her chamber opened and she let the pendant drop.

She knew who was behind her without turning. Only one man would dare enter without knocking.

“What are you doing?” asked Rafen.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Like you’re about to do something damned stupid.”

“Stupid?” said Miss Fortune, placing her hands on the table. “We shed blood and lost good people to bring down Gangplank. I’m not going to let the Harrowing just-”

“Just what?”

“Take this place from me,” she snapped lifting her pistols and jamming them into their custom tooled hip-scabbards. “And you’re not going to stop me.”

“We’re not here to stop you.”

Miss Fortune turned to see Rafen at the threshold of her chambers. A score of her best fighters waited in the vestibule beyond, armed to the teeth with a mixture of muskets, wheel-lock pistols, clanking bundles of clay splinter-bombs and cutlasses that looked like they’d been looted from a museum.

“Looks like you’re about to do something damned stupid as well,” she said.

“Aye,” agreed Rafen, walking over to the open window and slamming the shutters closed. “You really think we’d let our captain go out to face that alone?”

“I almost died bringing Gangplank down, and I’m not done yet. I don’t expect you to go with me, not tonight,” said Miss Fortune coming to stand before her men and resting her hands on the carved walnut grips of her guns. “This isn’t your fight.”

“Course it bloody is,” said Rafen.

Miss Fortune took a breath and nodded.

“There’s every chance we won’t live to see morning,” she said, unable to keep the hint of a smile tugging at her lip.

“This ain’t our first Harrowing together, Captain,” said Rafen, tapping the skull pommel of his sword. “And I’ll be damned if it’s our last.”

Olaf was in sight of the Winter’s Kiss when he heard the screams. He ignored them at first – screams were nothing new in Bilgewater – but then he saw men and women running from the quayside in terror, and his interest was piqued.

They scrambled from their boats and fled for the crooked streets as fast as they could. They didn’t look back and they didn’t stop, not even when a shipmate tripped or fell into the water.

Olaf had seen men run from battle, but this was something else. This was naked terror, the kind he’d only ever seen etched on the frozen corpses spat out by glaciers where the Ice Witch was said to dwell.

Shutters were slamming shut all across the wharf and the strange symbols he’d seen on every door were frantically being dusted with white powder. Enormous winches were lifting timber structures formed from bolted-together hulls of ships high up the cliffs.

He recognized a tavern-keeper who ran a drinking den where the beer was only slightly stronger than troll piss and waved to him.

“What’s going on?” shouted Olaf.

The tavern-keeper shook his head and pointed to the ocean before slamming his door. Olaf set the Krakenwyrm’s tooth on the stone wharf and turned to see what all the fuss was about.

At first he thought a storm was coming in, but it was just thick black sea fog, albeit fog that approached with unnatural speed and fluid motion.

“Ah, now,” he said, unhooking his axe from his belt. “This looks promising.”

The feel of the weapon’s battle-worn leather grip was pleasing in his callused palm as he passed it from hand to hand, rolling his shoulders to loosen the muscles.

The black mist swept over the farthest ships and Olaf’s eyes widened as he saw spirits plucked from the blackest nightmares writhing in the mist. A towering dreadknight, a monstrous chimera of warhorse and man, led them alongside a black-clad reaper limned in green fire. These lords of the dead left the spirit host to their sport on the quayside as they flew into Bilgewater proper with predatory speed.

Olaf had heard the natives speak in hushed whispers of something called the Harrowing, a time of doom and darkness, but hadn’t expected to be lucky enough to face it axe in hand.

The host of the dead tore into the wallowing galleys, merchantmen, and corsair ships with claw and fang, ripping them apart like an ursine with its snout in a fresh kill. Sailcloth tore and rigging lines snapped as easily as rotten sinew. Heavy masts splintered as boats were tossed into one another and smashed to kindling.

A host of screaming wraiths flew into the Winter’s Kiss and Olaf roared in anger as the Longreaver’s keel heaved and split, its timbers freezing solid in a heartbeat. The boat sank as swiftly as if its hold were filled with rocks, and Olaf saw his fellow Freljordians dragged below the water by creatures with cadaverous limbs and fish-hooked mouths.

“Olaf will make you wish you had stayed dead!” he yelled as he charged along the wharf.

Spirits boiled up from the ocean, icy claws slashing towards him. Olaf’s axe sang out, cleaving a glittering arc through the host. The dead screeched as his blade sundered them, its True Ice edge more lethal than any enchantment.

They howled as they died a second time and Olaf sang the song he’d written for the moment of his death with lusty vigor. The words were simple, but the equal of any saga told by the wandering poets of the ice. How long had he waited to sing these words? How often had he feared he might never get the chance?

A shimmering mist of snapping jaws swarmed him, specters and things of mist. Webs of frost patterned his hauberk and the deathly touch of voracious spirits burned his skin.

But Olaf’s heart was mighty and it fired his blood to heights of fury unknown to all but the berserker. He shrugged off the pain of the wraith touch, feeling reason recede and fury build.

Crimson froth built at the corners of his mouth as he bit the inside of his cheeks raw. He roared and swung his axe like a madman, caring nothing for pain, only that he slew his enemies.

That they were dead already meant nothing to him.

Olaf drew his axe back, ready to strike another blow, when a deafening crash of splintering columns and roof beams erupted behind him. He spun to face this new foe as a blizzard of smashed wood and stone cascaded onto the quayside. Bladed shards sliced his face and fist-sized chunks of stone pummeled his arms raw. Rendered fats and animal fluids fell in a rank drizzle as a horrendous groaning issued from the black mist.

Then he saw it.

The spirit of the Krakenwyrm arose from the remains of the Slaughter Dock. Titanic and filled with fury, its ghostly tentacles lifted into the air and smashed down like thunderbolts hurled by a wrathful god. An entire street was smashed to ruin in the blink of an eye and Olaf’s berserker fury surged as he finally beheld a foe worthy of claiming his life.

Olaf raised his axe in salute of his killer.

“Ya beauty!” he yelled and charged to his doom.

The woman was beautiful, with wide, almond shaped eyes, full lips and the high cheekbones common to Demacia. The portrait in the locket was a miniature masterpiece, but it failed to capture the depth of Senna’s strength and determination.

He rarely looked at her picture, knowing that to carry his grief too close to his heart made him weak. Grief was a chink in his armor. Lucian could not allow himself to truly feel her loss, so he snapped the locket shut. He knew he should bury it in the sand of this cave beneath the cliffs, but could not put her memory below the earth as he had her body.

He would shut the grief away until Thresh was destroyed and Senna’s death avenged.

Then, and only then, would Lucian mourn his lost wife with tears and offerings to the Veiled Lady.

How long had it been since that terrible night?

He felt the bottomless abyss of sorrow lurking in ambush and viciously suppressed it as he had so many times before. He drew on the teachings of his order, repeating the mantras he and Senna had been taught to close themselves off from emotion. Only then could he reach a place of equilibrium that would allow him to face deathly horrors beyond imagining.

The grief ebbed slowly, but it remained.

He’d opened the locket only reluctantly, feeling a growing distance between himself and Senna’s memory. He found he could no longer recall the exact sweep of her jawline, the smoothness of her skin or the precise color of her eyes.

The longer his hunt went on, the further away she felt.

Lucian lifted his head, letting the breath ease from his lungs, forcing his heartbeat to slow.

The walls of the cave were pale limestone, gouged from the cliffs upon which Bilgewater was built. The motion of water and the stone picks of the natives had crafted a labyrinth beneath the city few knew of or even suspected existed. The pale rock walls were etched with looping spirals, rippling waves and things that might have been unblinking eyes.

He’d learned these were symbols of the native religion, but whoever had carved them had not visited this place in many years. He’d found it by following the secret symbols of his own order, symbols that would guide him to places of refuge and succor in any city of Valoran.

Only dim reflections of light shimmered on the roof of the cave, but as his eyes followed the spiral of carvings, a shimmering radiance spread from his palm.

Let me be your shield.

Lucian looked down, the memory of her words as clear as though she stood next to him.

The locket glistened with lambent green flame.

He looped the chain of the locket around his neck and swept up his twin relic pistols.

“Thresh,” he whispered.

Bilgewater’s streets were deserted. The bells from the ocean were still ringing and cries of terror echoed from below. Rat Town was completely covered by the Black Mist, and howling storms raged over Port Mourn’s desolation. Fires burned all along Butcher’s Bridge and a shimmering fog clung to the cliffs above the Grey Harbor.

The people in the upper reaches of the city hid in their homes and prayed to the Bearded Lady that the Harrowing would pass them by, that grief would fall upon some other poor unfortunate.

Warding candles of ambergris burned in every window, shimmering through bottle green sea-glass. Burning roots of Empress of the Dark Forest hung from doors, shutters and nailed up planks.

“People really believe in the Empress?” asked Miss Fortune.

Rafen shrugged, his mouth a thin line and the creases around his eyes pulled tight as he searched the gathering mist for threats. He pulled out a smoldering length of identical root from beneath his shirt.

“It’s all about where you place your faith, isn’t it?”

Miss Fortune drew her pistols.

“I have faith in these and in us,” she said. “What else are you carrying?”

“This cutlass has kept me safe through six Harrowings,” he said, tapping its pommel again. “I offered up a bottle of ten year old rum to the Bearded Lady and this knife here was sold to me by a man who swore its edge was purest sunsteel.”

Miss Fortune glanced at the scabbarded knife, certain without even seeing the blade that Rafen had been swindled. The workmanship around the quillons was too poor to be Demacian, but she wasn’t about to tell him that.

“What about you?” he asked.

Miss Fortune patted her pouch of pistol shot.

“Every one’s been dipped in Myron’s Dark,” she said, loud enough for every one of her thirty-strong company to hear. “If the dead want a fight, we’ll meet them with spirits of our own.”

The oppressive gloom made it hard to laugh, but she saw a few smiles and that was about as much as she could expect on a night like this.

She turned and pushed down into Bilgewater, descending crooked stairs cut into the rock of the cliffs, crossing secret bridges of half-rotted rope and threading forgotten alleys that hadn’t known the tread of feet in years.

She brought them out into a wide square on one of the floating wharf-shanties, where swaying dwellings leaned together as though their twisted eaves whispered to one another. Every façade was a mishmash of driftwood, and patterns of frost clung to the skewed timbers. Frozen winds blew through the patchwork dwellings, freighted with sobs and screams from afar. Flaming braziers hung from hundreds of mast-lines strung between buildings, smoking with strange herbs. Pools of water rippled with reflections of things that weren’t there.

Most days this was a thriving marketplace, packed to the gunwales with stalls, rattling meat-vendors, drink-hawkers, merchants, pirates, bounty hunters and surly flotsam washed in from every corner of the world. Just about everywhere in Bilgewater had a view of this place, which was just how Miss Fortune wanted it.

Mist clung to every outcropping of timber.

Discarded figureheads wept frozen tears.

Mist and shadows gathered.

“Cutpurse Square?” said Rafen. “How did we get here? I ran this place as a wharf-snipe. Thought I knew every way in and out like any good little thief.”

“Not every way,” said Miss Fortune.

The counting houses on either side were silent and dark, and she resisted the impulse to look through the torn sheets of flapping canvas nailed over porthole windows.

“How do you know these routes and I don’t?”

“Lady Bilgewater and I are two of a kind,” said Miss Fortune, her gaze narrowing as black mist seeped into the square. “She whispers her secrets to me like an old friend, so I know her every hidden wynd and jitty like you never will.”

Rafen grunted as they spread into the empty square.

“What next?”

“We wait,” said Miss Fortune as they reached the center of the square, feeling terribly exposed.

The black mist twitched with things moving in its depths.

A disembodied skull of ghostly light stretched from the darkness, empty-eyed and with sharpened teeth. Its jaw stretched wider than any natural bone structure would allow and a keening wail built in its gullet.

Miss Fortune’s bullets punched through each of its eye-sockets and the skull vanished with a shriek of frustration. She twisted the wheel-lock on each pistol and ingenious mechanisms within reloaded each one.

For a moment, all was silent.

Then the black mist erupted in a screeching howl as the spirits of the dead surged into the square.

For the second time this evening, Olaf cut his way inside the dead Krakenwyrm. He wielded his axe like a crazed woodsman, hewing left and right with gleeful abandon. The beast’s vast limbs were insubstantial as mist, yet the ice of his blade clove them like flesh.

Tentacles flailed and slammed down on the stone of the wharf, but Olaf was fast for a big man. Slow warriors didn’t survive in the Freljord. He rolled and slashed with his axe, severing a suckered length of limb that faded from existence as it was parted from the monster’s body.

Even in the grip of the red shroud, Olaf saw the creature’s skull in the thrashing chaos of phantom limbs surrounding him.

Its eyes were afire with the enraged spirit of its life.

A moment of sublime connection passed between them.

The beast’s soul knew him.

Olaf laughed with joy.

“You see the taker of your life and we are now bonded in death!” he roared. “Mayhap if you kill me, we shall battle forever in the realms beyond mortal ken.”

The prospect of eternal war against so mighty a foe poured fresh strength into Olaf’s aching muscles. He charged towards the creature’s maw, caring nothing for his pain as each brush with the Krakenwyrm’s tentacles burned his skin worse than the splinter-winds of the Lokfar coast.

He leapt into the air, axe aloft.

He looked glorious death in the face.

A tentacle whipped out and lashed around his thigh.

It swung him around in a dizzying arc, lifting him high into the air.

“Come then!” bellowed Olaf, punching his axe skyward in salute of their shared destiny. “Unto death!”

A wraith-creature with grasping talons and a mouth of icy fangs lunged from the swirling mass of spirits. Miss Fortune put a bullet through its face and it vanished like smoke in a gale.

A second shot and another spirit vanished.

She grinned through her fear as she spun into cover behind a weather-worn stone bollard of the River King to reload. On impulse, she leaned over and gave his toothy grin a kiss.

It’s all about where you place your faith.

Gods, bullets or her own skill?

The grin fell from her face as one of the pistols jammed with a grinding crunch of metal. Her mother’s admonishing words arose from the dark recesses of memory.

“That’s what you get when someone else mixes your powder, Sarah,” she said, holstering the gun and sliding her sword from its sheath. She’d looted it from the captain of a Demacian galiot running north up the Shuriman rust-coast, and it was as fine an example of the artificer’s art as any she’d seen.

Miss Fortune spun from cover, firing her loaded pistol and slashing her sword through the mist creatures. Her shot plucked another specter from the air and her sword’s edge bit as if cutting flesh and bone. Did the spirits of the dead have a physical component to them that could be hurt? It seemed unlikely, but she was wounding something inside them.

She didn’t have time to think too hard on the matter and suspected that whatever power she’d tapped into would be undone if she did.

Men and women screamed as the howling storm of dead spirits filled Cutpurse Square, slashing with claws that froze their blood or reached into chests and sundered hearts with terror. Seven were dead, maybe more, their souls wrenched from their fallen corpses to turn on their comrades. Her heroic band fought with blades and muskets, shouting the name of the Bearded Lady, their loved ones, and even heathen gods of faraway lands.

Whatever works, thought Miss Fortune.

Rafen was down on one knee, his face ashen, breathing like a wharfside doxy after a long shift. Scraps of mist clung to him like cobwebs and the smoldering root around his neck burned with a fierce cherry red glow.

“On your feet, this fight isn’t done!” she said.

“Don’t tell me the fight’s not done,” he snapped, pushing himself to his feet. “I’ve been through more Harrowings than you could wrap a dead rat’s tail around.”

Before Miss Fortune could ask exactly what that meant, he leaned to the side and fired his pistol at something behind her. A conjoined spirit of wolf and bat screeched as it was banished, and Miss Fortune returned the favor as a spirit form of grasping hooks and snapping fangs lunged at her second in command.

“Everyone down!” shouted Miss Fortune, plucking a pair of splinter bombs from her belt and lobbing them into the howling mist.

They detonated in a deafening explosion of fire and smoke. Wood splinters and fragments of stone ricocheted. Broken glass fell in a glittering rain of daggers. Acrid fog filled the square, but it was man-made and entirely bereft of spirits.

Rafen shook his head and worked a finger in his ear.

“What was in that bomb?”

“Black Powder mixed with essence of copal and rue,” said Miss Fortune. “One from my special stash.”

“And stuff like that works against the dead?”

“My mother believed in it,” she said.

“Good enough for me,” said Rafen. “You know, we might just make it through-”

“Don’t say it,” warned Miss Fortune.

The mist began coalescing throughout the square, first in thin tendrils and wisps, then in glowing outlines of monsters; things with conjoined legs, fang-filled jaws, and arms that ended in hooks or pincers. The spirits they thought they’d killed.

Reforming, returning.

What was it folk said about plans and the contents of a privy?

“Turns out the dead are pretty hard to kill,” said Miss Fortune, trying not to let her fear show.

She’d been naïve to think petty trinkets and blind faith were enough to face the spirits of the dead. She’d wanted to show the people of Bilgewater they didn’t need Gangplank, that they could forge their own destiny.

Instead, she was going to get herself killed and leave the city to be torn apart.

A bass rumble rolled through the square. Then another.

Percussive thunder strikes, rising in a stalking storm.

It grew to become pounding hammerblows upon an anvil. Faster and louder until the ground shook with its violence.

“What in the nine deeps is that?” said Rafen.

“I don’t know,” said Miss Fortune as the outline of a spectral horseman in midnight plate emerged from the mist. He sat atop a strangely proportioned warhorse and his helm was worked in the form of a snarling demon.

“A dread knight,” said Miss Fortune.

Rafen shook his head, his face drained of color.

“That’s no knight,” he said. “That’s the Shadow of War…”

Paralyzing terror rippled through Miss Fortune’s company at the mention of this eternal nightmare of killing rage and endless fury.

The Shadow of War.

His name was once Hecarim, but no one knew if that were true or some ancient taleteller’s invention. Only fools dared recite his dark legend around the hearthfire, and even then only after enough rum to sink a Noxian war-barque.

As the Shadow of War emerged further from the mist, Miss Fortune saw he was no mere horseman. Cold dread settled upon her like a shroud at the sight of the monstrous creature.

Perhaps Hecarim had once been a knight, man and horse separate entities. But rider and mount were now one, a single, towering behemoth whose only purpose was destruction.

“They’re all around us,” said a voice.

Miss Fortune risked looking away from the armored centaur to see a whole host of ghostly knights, their outlines lambent with pellucid green radiance. They leveled lances or drew swords of dark radiance. Hecarim swept out a hooked and terrible glaive, its killing edge erupting with green fire.

“You know any secret ways out of here?” asked Rafen.

“No,” said Miss Fortune. “I want to fight that bastard.”

“You want to fight the Shadow of War?”

Before Miss Fortune could answer, a hooded figure leapt from the rooftop of a grain store and dropped into the square. He landed gracefully, a storm coat of worn leather splayed behind him. He carried two pistols, but they were like no weapons Miss Fortune had ever seen on her mother’s gun-table; bronzed metalwork braced around hunks of what looked like carved stone.

Light filled the square as he loosed searing bolts from each pistol in a fusillade that put the destruction of the Dead Pool to shame. The man turned in a tight spiral, marking targets and picking them off with whip-fast motion. The mist burned where his bolts struck, and the ghostly wraiths screeched as they were consumed.

The mist withdrew from Cutpurse Square, taking Hecarim and the death knights with it. Something told Miss Fortune this was but a temporary respite.

The man holstered his pistols and turned to look at Miss Fortune, throwing back his hood to reveal darkly handsome features with haunted eyes.

“The thing about shadows,” he said. “Bring enough light and they disappear.”

Olaf was not happy with this doom.

He hoped men would speak of his epic battle with the Krakenwyrm, not this ignoble fall to his death.

He hoped someone might have seen him charge the sea beast.

He prayed at least one observer had seen him lifted high into the air by its ghostly tentacle, then fled before seeing him hurled away like an unworthy morsel.

Olaf crashed down through the roof of a building bolted to the side of the cliff. Maybe it was a ship’s hull? He fell too fast to make it out. Crashing timbers and earthenware tumbled with him in his headlong plunge through the building. He glimpsed astonished, shouting faces flash past him.

Olaf smashed through a floor. A support beam drove the wind from him as he tumbled down Bilgewater’s cliffs. He bounced from an outcrop of rock and went headfirst through an open window, crashing out again through yet another floor.

Angry curses followed him down.

He spun out into a trailing forest of ropes and pulleys, flags and pennants. He thrashed as he fell, tangling his limbs and weapon. Fate was mocking him, wrapping him in a folded shroud of canvas sailcloth.

“Not like this, damn it!” he roared. “Not like this!”

“Who are you and where can I get a pair of guns like those?” said Miss Fortune, offering her hand to the new arrival.

“My name is Lucian,” he said, warily taking her hand.

“Damn glad to know you, friend,” said Rafen, clapping him on the back as if they were old shipmates. Miss Fortune saw Rafen’s familiarity made Lucian acutely uncomfortable, like he’d forgotten how to be around others.

His eyes scanned the edges of the square, his fingers dancing on the grips of his pistols.

“You’re a welcome sight, Lucian,” said Miss Fortune.

“We should move.” he said. “The Shadow of War will return.”

“He’s right,” said Rafen, giving her an imploring look. “It’s time to get inside, batten down the hatches.”

“No. We came out to fight.”

“Look, I get it, Sarah. We won Bilgewater and you need to fight to hold onto it, to show everyone you’re better than Gangplank. Well, you’ve done that. We went out into the Black Mist and we fought the dead. That’s more than he ever did. Anyone who risks lookin’ out a window is gonna know that. Hell, even the ones who ain’t looking will hear about it. What more do you want?”

“To fight for Bilgewater.”

“There’s fighting for Bilgewater and then there’s dying for Bilgewater,” said Rafen. “I’m all up for the first, not so much the second. These men and women followed you down into hell, but now it’s time to climb back out.”

Miss Fortune faced her company of fighters, every ragged, cutthroat one of them. None of them could be trusted not to sell their own mothers for a shiny trinket, but they’d done everything and more she’d asked of them. Venturing out into the Black Mist was just about the bravest thing any of them had ever done and she couldn’t repay that by leading them to their deaths for the sake of her vengeance.

“You’re right,” she said, taking a breath. “We’re done here.”

“Then may fortune follow you,” said Lucian, turning away and drawing his strange pistols once again.

“Wait,” said Miss Fortune. “Come with us.”

Lucian shook his head. “No, there is a mist wraith I need to destroy. The one they call Thresh, the Chain Warden. I owe him a death.”

Miss Fortune saw the lines around Lucian’s eyes deepen and recognized the expression she’d worn ever since her mother’s murder.

“He took someone from you, didn’t he?” she said.

Lucian nodded slowly, and said no more, but his very silence spoke volumes.

“This clearly isn’t your first tussle with the dead,” she said, “but you won’t survive the night if you stay out here alone. I’m guessing that might not mean much to you, but whoever this Thresh took from you, they wouldn’t want you to die here.”

Lucian’s eyes flicked downwards, and Miss Fortune saw a silver locket just visible round his neck. Was it her imagination or a trick of the mist that made it shimmer in the moonlight?

“Come with us,” said Miss Fortune. “Find somewhere safe till morning and you’ll live to do it again.”

“Safe? Where is safe in this city?” said Lucian.

“I think I might know a place,” said Miss Fortune.

They left Cutpurse Square and were traveling west up towards the Serpent Bridge when they found the Freljordian. He hung from a crooked spar like a shrouded corpse on a gibbet. Unlike most corpses, however, this one was thrashing like a landed fish.

A splintered pile of debris lay scattered all around him, and Miss Fortune looked up to see how far he’d fallen through the cliffside dwellings.

A long way was the answer, and that he was still alive was nothing short of a miracle.

Lucian leveled his pistols, but she shook her head.

“No, this one’s actually on the right side of the grave.”

Muffled cries came from within the shroud, curses that would get a man beaten to death in a host of different lands, shouted in a thick, Freljordian accent.

She placed the tip of her sword against the canvas and sliced downwards. Like a newborn sea-calf pulled from a ruptured birth-sac, a hugely bearded man spilled onto the cobbles. The reek of fish guts and offal clung to him.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet, brandishing an axe with a blade like a shard of diamond ice.

“Which way to the Slaughter Docks?” he said, weaving like a drunk. He looked around, confused, his head a mass of lumps and bruises.

“Ordinarily I’d tell you to follow your nose,” said Miss Fortune, “but I’d be amazed if you’ve any sense of smell left.”

“I’ll kill that Krakenwyrm ten times over if I have to,” said the man. “I owe it a death.”

“Lot of that going around tonight,” said Miss Fortune.

The Freljordian named himself Olaf, a warrior of the rightful mistress of the ice, and, after shaking off his concussion, declared his intention to join them until he could fight the most dangerous spirit within the Black Mist.

“Do you want to die?” Lucian asked him.

“Of course,” said Olaf, as though the very question was the height of foolishness. “I seek an ending worthy of legend.”

Miss Fortune left the madman to his dreams of death. So long as he swung that axe in the right direction, he was welcome to join them as they pushed onwards.

Three times the mist closed in on them, and each time it took an unlucky soul from their company. Spiteful laughter echoed from the sides of buildings, the sound of a whetstone over rusted steel. Ranks of carrion birds cawed from rooftops in anticipation of a flesh banquet by the light of the moon. Welcoming lights danced in the darkness of the mist, like beguiling corpse-candles over sucking marshland.

“Don’t look at them,” warned Lucian.

His warning came too late for one man and his wife. Miss Fortune didn’t know their names, but knew they had lost a son to ocean-ague less than a year ago. They walked from the cliffs following a vision in the lights only they could see.

Another man took his hooked hand to his throat before his friends could stop him. Another simply vanished into the mist without anyone seeing him go.

By the time they reached Serpent Bridge, their company numbered less than a dozen. Miss Fortune couldn’t feel sorry for them, she’d told them not to come with her. If they’d wanted to live forever, they should be shuttered behind closed doors and protective carvings, clutching spiral talismans of the Bearded Lady and praying to whatever gave them solace.

But against the Harrowing, even that was no guarantee of safety.

They’d passed countless homes smashed open with splintered shutters and doors hanging limply from leather hinges. Miss Fortune kept her eyes fixed forward, but it was impossible not to feel the accusing gazes from the frozen faces within or sense the terror of their last moments.

“The Black Mist will have its due,” said Rafen as they passed yet another charnel house, the families within cold and dead.

She wanted to be angry at such acceptance of horror, but what good would that do? After all, he was right.

Instead, she focused on the hazed outline of the structure across the bridge. It sat in the center of a gouged crater in the cliff, as if some mighty sea creature had taken a vast bite from the rock. Like most places in Bilgewater it was constructed from the ocean’s leavings. Its walls were driftwood and branches from faraway lands, its windows the scavenged remains of ships swept up from the seabed. It had a peculiar quality of possessing not a single straight line anywhere in its construction. The curious angles gave it a sense of being somehow in motion, as if it might one day choose another place to set down temporary roots.

Its spire was likewise crooked, fluted like the horn of a narwhal and topped with the same spiral symbol Miss Fortune wore around her neck. A shimmering light wreathed the icon, and where it shone the darkness was held in abeyance.

“What is that place?” asked Lucian.

“The Temple of the Bearded Lady,” she said. “The House of Nagakabouros.”

“Is it safe?”

“It’s better than staying out here.”

Lucian nodded and they set off across the winding length of the bridge. Like the temple it approached, the bridge was an uneven thing, its cobbles undulant like something alive.

Rafen paused at the crumbling parapet and looked down.

“Getting higher every year,” he said.

Reluctantly, Miss Fortune joined him and looked over the edge.

The docks and Rat Town were smothered beneath the Black Mist, and even the web of gun’dolas was barely visible. Bilgewater was choking in the grip of the mist, its tendrils seeping ever deeper into the city. Screams of terror drifted upwards, each one a life ended and a fresh soul for the legion of the dead.

Rafen shrugged. “A few years from now there won’t be anywhere in Bilgewater beyond its reach.”

“A lot can happen in a few years,” said Miss Fortune.

“This happens every year?” asked Olaf, one foot perched on the parapet with a reckless disregard for the dizzying drop.

Miss Fortune nodded.

“Excellent,” said the Freljordian. “If I am fated not to die this night, I will return here when the Black Mist rises again.”

“It’s your funeral,” replied Rafen.

“Thank you,” said Olaf, slapping an enormous palm on Rafen’s back, almost knocking him from the bridge. The Freljordian’s eyes widened as a host of ghostly tentacles rose from the mist, uncoiling to smash down on the dwellings of Rat Town.

“The beast!” he cried.

And before anyone could stop him, he vaulted onto the parapet and hurled himself from the edge.

“Mad bastard,” said Rafen as Olaf’s dwindling form vanished into the mist below.

“All the ice-dwellers are mad,” said Miss Fortune. “But he was madder than most I’ve met.”

“Get everyone inside,” said Lucian.

She heard the urgency in his voice and turned to see him facing a towering figure in stitched black robes hung with hooked chains. Sickly green light wreathed the specter as it lifted a swaying lantern in one pallid hand. Fear touched Miss Fortune, fear like nothing she’d known since she’d watched her mother die and stared down the barrel of the killer’s gun.

Lucian drew his pistols. “Thresh is mine.”

“He’s all yours,” she said, and turned away.

Her gaze was drawn upwards as shadows closed around the temple. The breath caught in her throat as she saw Hecarim and his death knights at the crater’s ridge.

The Shadow of War raised his fiery glaive and the ghostly horsemen urged their hell-steeds downward. No mortal rider could make that descent, but these were riders of death.

“Run!” shouted Miss Fortune.

The end of the bridge thickened with noxious green light. The Chain Warden hid his corpse features beneath a rotted hood, but the light of his lantern hinted at the remains of ravaged flesh, gaunt and drained of all emotion, save sadistic relish.

He moved softly, like all his kind. Pained moans sighed from his robes as he moved. Thresh lifted his head a fraction, and Lucian saw the glint of too-sharp teeth widen in a grin of anticipation.

“Mortal,” said Thresh, rolling the word around his mouth like a sweetmeat.

Lucian knelt, reciting the mantra of clarity to steel his soul for the battle to come. He had prepared for this moment a thousand times, and now that it was here, his mouth was dry, his palms slick with sweat.

“You murdered Senna,” he said, standing and lifting his head. “The only person I had left in the world.”

“Senna...?” said Thresh, the sound wet and gurgling, as though squeezed from a throat once crushed by a hangman’s noose.

“My wife,” said Lucian, knowing he should not speak, that every word was a weapon the wraith would turn against him. Tears blurred his vision as grief washed away every preparation and every shred of logic. He lifted the silver locket from around his neck and snapped it open, needing the wraith to understand the depth of all he had lost.

Thresh grinned, his needle teeth glinting as he tapped the glass of the lantern with a yellowed nail.

“I remember her,” he said. “A vital soul. Not yet barren and cold. Ripe for torment. Hope for a new life. It bloomed in her, you know. Fresh, new, like a spring flower. All too easy to pluck and ruin those with dreams.”

Lucian lifted his pistols.

“If you remember her, then you will remember these,” he said.

The toothed grin never faltered beneath the ragged cowl.

“The weapons of light,” he said.

“And light is ever the bane of darkness,” said Lucian, channeling every scrap of hatred into his relic pistols.

“Wait,” said Thresh, but Lucian was done waiting.

He loosed a pair of blinding shots.

A conflagration of purifying fire engulfed the Chain Warden and his howls were music to Lucian’s ears.

Then the howls changed to gurgling laughter.

A nimbus of dark light faded around Thresh, drawn back into his lantern and leaving him utterly untouched by the fire.

Lucian fired again, a storm of radiant bolts, each perfectly aimed, but every one wasted. Each shot dissipated harmlessly against a shimmering haze of dark energy from the lantern.

“Yes, I remember those weapons,” said the wraith. “I tore their secrets from her mind.”

Lucian froze.

“What did you just say?”

Thresh laughed, a wheezing, consumptive rasp.

“You don’t know? After all the reborn order learned of me, you never once suspected?”

Lucian felt cold dread settle in his belly. A horror he had never acknowledged for fear he would go insane.

“She did not die,” continued Thresh, holding up his lantern.

Lucian saw tortured spirits twisting in its depths.

Thresh grinned. “I ripped her soul out and kept it.”

“No...” said Lucian. “I saw her die.”

“She screams still inside my lantern,” said Thresh, drifting closer with every choked-out word. “Her every moment of existence is sweet agony. Listen...can you hear her?”

“No,” sobbed Lucian, his relic pistols falling to the stones of the bridge.

Thresh circled him, chains snaking from his leather belt and slithering over Lucian’s body. The hooks cut into his storm coat, seeking the soft flesh beneath.

“Hope was her weakness. Love her undoing.”

Lucian looked up into Thresh’s ravaged features.

His eyes were voids, dark holes into emptiness.

Whatever Thresh had been in life, nothing now remained. No compassion, no mercy and no humanity.

“All is death and suffering, mortal,” said the Chain Warden, reaching for Lucian’s neck. “No matter where you run, your only true legacy is death. But before then, there is me.”

The breath hammered in Miss Fortune’s throat as she ran for the temple. Her lungs fought to draw breath, and her veins felt sluggish with ice. Coils of enervating mist reached up to the rock of the temple, drawn by the presence of the two lords of the unliving. Brilliant flashes of light flared behind her, but she didn’t look back. She heard the thunder of hoof beats on rock, seeing sparks above them in the darkness.

She imagined the breath of ghostly steeds on her neck.

The space between her shoulder blades burned hot where she expected the stabbing thrust of a spectral lance.

Wait, how can they make sparks when they’re ghosts?

The absurdity of the thought made her laugh, and she was still laughing as she slammed into the warped timber doors of the temple. Rafen and her ragged band were already there, hammering fists and palms against the door.

“In the name of the Bearded Lady, let us in!” he yelled.

He looked up as Miss Fortune joined him.

“The doors are shut,” he said.

“I noticed,” she gasped, wrenching the pendant Illaoi had given her. She placed her palm flat on door, with the coral pressed hard against the wood.

“Illaoi!” she shouted. “I’m ready to stamp on that damn eel’s neck. Now open the bloody door!”

“Eel?” said Rafen. “What eel? What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” she snapped, battering her palm bloody against the wood. “I think it was a metaphor.”

The door swung outwards as if it had been unbarred the whole time. Miss Fortune stepped back to allow her fighters inside first, and finally turned around.

Hecarim reared up and swung his fiery glaive for her skull.

A hand grasped her collar and hauled her backward. The tip of the weapon sliced an inch from her throat.

She fell hard on her backside.

Illaoi stood in the doorway, holding her stone idol out before her like a shield. White mist clung to it like corposant.

“The dead are not welcome here,” she said.

Rafen and the others hauled the door shut and dropped a heavy spar of seasoned oak into place on the rusted anchors to either side. A huge impact slammed into the door.

Wood split and splinters flew.

Illaoi turned and walked past Miss Fortune, still sprawled on a mosaic floor of seashells and clay fragments.

“You took your sweet time, girl,” she said as Miss Fortune climbed to her feet. The temple was filled with at least two hundred people, maybe more. She saw a wide cross section of Bilgewater’s denizens: its native population, pirates, traders and assorted sea-scum, together with travellers unlucky or unwise enough to seek a berth so close to the Harrowing.

“Is that door going to hold?” she asked.

“It will or it won’t,” said Illaoi, heading towards a many-tentacled statue at the centre of the temple. Miss Fortune tried to make sense of it, but gave up when her eye kept getting lost in the many spirals and looping curves.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have,” said Illaoi, setting her idol in a concave depression in the statue. She began moving in a circle around the statue, beating a rhythmic pattern on her thighs and chest with her fists. The people in the temple joined her circling, beating palms against bare skin, stamping their feet and speaking in a language she didn’t understand.

“What are they doing?”

“Giving some motion back to the world,” said Illaoi. “But we will need time.”

“You’ll have it,” promised Miss Fortune.

Lucian felt the spectral hooks bite deep into his flesh, colder than northern ice and twice as painful. The Chain Warden’s hand closed on his throat and his skin burned at the wraith’s touch. He felt his strength drawn from him, the beat of his heart slow.

Thresh lifted him from the ground and held his lantern aloft, ready to receive his soul. The moaning lights within swirled in agitation, ghostly faces and hands pressing against the glass from within.

“Long I have sought your soul, shadow hunter,” said Thresh. “But only now is it ripe for the taking.”

Lucian’s vision greyed at the edges, feeling his soul peel away from his bones. He fought to hold on, but the Chain Warden had been harvesting souls for countless lifetimes and knew his craft better than any.

“Struggle harder,” said Thresh with monstrous appetite. “Your soul burns brighter when you fight.”

Lucian tried to speak, but no words came out, just a soft stream of warm breath that carried his soul.

A glittering scythe floated in the air above Lucian, a murder-soaked reaper of souls. Its blade shivered with anticipation.

Lucian...

That voice. Her voice.

My love...

The murder-edge of Thresh’s blade turned, angled to better part soul from flesh.

Lucian drew back his breath as he saw a face resolve in the glass of the lantern. One among countless thousands, but one with more reason than any to push herself to the fore.

Full lips, wide, almond shaped eyes, imploring him to live.

“Senna...” gasped Lucian.

Let me be your shield.

He knew what she meant in a heartbeat.

The link between them was as strong as it had been when they hunted the creatures of shadow side by side.

With the last of his strength, Lucian reached up and snapped the locket from around his neck. The chain glittered silver in the moonlight.

The Chain Warden saw something was amiss and hissed in anger.

Lucian was faster.

He spun the chain like a slingshot, but instead of loosing a lead bullet, he lashed it around the arm holding the lantern. Before Thresh could shake it off, Lucian drew the silver awl from its sheath in his long coat and plunged it into the specter’s wrist.

The Chain Warden screeched in pain, a sensation he had likely not felt in millennia. He dropped Lucian and thrashed in agony as the myriad souls trapped in his lantern suddenly found a means to strike back at their tormentor.

Lucian felt his soul snap back into his body and drew in heaving gulps of air, like a drowning man breaking the surface.

Hurry, my love. He is too strong...

His sight returned, clearer than ever before. Lucian snatched his pistols from the ground. He caught the briefest glimpse of Senna’s face in the lantern and etched it on his heart.

Never again would her face grow dim in his memories.

“Thresh,” he said, aiming his twin pistols.

The Chain Warden looked up, the voids of his eyes alight with outrage at the defiance of his captive souls. He held Lucian’s gaze and extended his lantern, but the rebellious souls had dispelled whatever protection it once offered.

Lucian fired a blistering series of perfect shots.

They burned through the Chain Warden’s ghostly robes and ignited his spirit form in a searing inferno of light. Lucian marched towards Thresh, his twin weapons blazing.

Shrieking in agony, the Chain Warden retreated from Lucian’s unending barrage, his wraithform now powerless to resist these weapons of ancient power.

“Death is here for you,” said Lucian. “Embrace it, safe in the knowledge I will ensure it is final.”

Thresh gave one last howl before leaping from the bridge, falling like a burning comet to the city below.

Lucian watched him fall until the Black Mist swallowed him.

He slumped to his knees.

“Thank you, my love,” said Lucian. “My light.”

The temple walls shook with the violence of the assault. Black mist oozed between ill-fitting planks and through cracks in the scavenged glass of the windows. The door shuddered in its frame. Grasping claws of mist tore at the wood. Screams echoed as a howling gale battered the mismatched timbers of the roof.

“Over there!” shouted Miss Fortune as a host of mist-creatures with burning red eyes poured through a broken section of wall that had once been a series of tea-chests from Ionia.

She leapt into the midst of the wraiths. It felt like jumping naked into an ice hole cut in a glacier. Even the lightest touch of the dead leeched warmth and life.

The coral pendant burned hot against her skin.

She slashed her looted sword through the creatures and felt the same bite she’d felt before. Her bullets might be useless against the dead, but this Demacian blade hurt them. They fell back from her, screeching and hissing.

Could the dead know fear?

It seemed they could, for they fled the sword’s glittering edge. She didn’t let them go, stabbing and slashing the mist wherever it poured in.

“That’s it! Run!” she yelled.

A child screamed and Miss Fortune sprinted over as the mist reached to claim him. She dived and snatched the boy in her arms before rolling to safety. Chill claws plunged into her back, and Miss Fortune gasped as numbing cold spread through her limbs.

She stabbed behind her and something dead howled.

A woman sheltering behind an overturned pew reached for the boy and Miss Fortune let him squirm to safety. She pushed herself to her feet, weakness spreading through her body like a raging infection.

Everywhere was gunfire and clashing steel, deathly howls and screams of terror.

“Sarah!” shouted Rafen.

She looked up to see the oaken locking bar securing the door split along its length. Rafen and a dozen men had their backs braced against the bludgeoning assault, but the doors were bulging inwards. Cracks spread and grasping hands of mist reached inside. A man was snatched backwards and his piteous screams were abruptly cut off as he vanished into the mist.

Another had his arm ripped off as he reached to help him.

Rafen spun and rammed his dagger through the gap.

Clawed hands tore the useless weapon from his hand.

A howling body pushed itself in through the disintegrating door and plunged its hands into Rafen’s chest. Her second in command roared in pain, his face draining of color.

She staggered over to him, her strength all but gone. Her blade hacked through spectral arms, and the creature shrieked as it vanished. Rafen fell into her, and they collapsed back into the nave together.

Rafen gasped for breath, his features as slack as hers.

“Don’t you die on me, Rafen!” she wheezed.

“It’ll take more than the dead to kill me,” he grunted. “Bastard thing just winded me.”

Glass broke somewhere up above. Coils of black mist coalesced overhead, a boiling mass of snapping teeth, claws and hungry eyes.

Miss Fortune tried to get to her feet, but her limbs burned with exhaustion. She ground her teeth in frustration. Barely a handful of her company remained, and the people sheltering in here weren’t fighters.

The dead were getting in.

Miss Fortune looked back at Illaoi.

The priestess was surrounded by her people, all of them still circling the statue and performing their fist-thumping, palm-slapping ritual. It didn’t appear to be achieving anything. The strange statue remained unmoving and impotent.

What had she expected, that it would come to life and drive the dead back like some clanking iron golem from Piltover?

“Whatever it is you’re doing, do it faster!” shouted Miss Fortune.

A section of the roof ripped loose and spun off into the tempest surrounding the temple. A swirling column of spirits boiled inside and touched down like a tornado. Wraiths and things that defied understanding spun from the unliving vortex to fall upon the living.

Finally the door gave out and exploded inwards, the timbers dry and rotted by the touch of the dead. The skirling blast of a hunting horn filled the temple, and Miss Fortune’s hands flew to her ears at its deafening echoes.

Hecarim rode into the temple, crushing the men who’d been bracing the door with their bodies. Their souls were drawn up into the Shadow of War’s flaming glaive, and the cold fire of its edge illuminated the temple with loathsome radiance. His death knights rode at his back, and the spirits already within the temple drew back in recognition of Hecarim’s terrible glory.

“I said the dead are not welcome here,” boomed Illaoi.

Miss Fortune looked up to see the priestess towering over her, stout and majestic. Pale light clung to her limbs and sparkled on the stone tablet she held in trembling hands. Veins stood out like hawsers on her neck, and her jawline was taut with effort. Sweat ran in runnels down her face.

Whatever Illaoi was doing was costing her greatly.

“These mortal souls are mine,” said Hecarim, and Miss Fortune felt herself recoil from the iron syllables of his voice.

“They are not,” said Illaoi. “This is the house of Nagakabouros, who stands in opposition to the dead.”

“The dead will have their due,” said Hecarim, lowering his glaive to point at Illaoi’s heart.

The priestess shook her head.

“Not today,” she said. “Not while I still move.”

“You cannot stop me.”

“Deaf as well as dead,” grinned Illaoi as a swelling radiance built behind her. “I didn’t say I was going to stop you.”

Miss Fortune turned and saw the spiraling statue bathed in blinding radiance. White light smoked from its surfaces, and shadows fled from its touch. She shielded her eyes as the light billowed outwards like writhing tentacles and where it met the Black Mist it stripped it bare, exposing the twisted souls within. The sinuous light pulled the dead onwards, purging the baleful magic that cursed them to undeath so very long ago.

She expected screams, but instead the unbound dead wept with joy as their souls were freed to move on. The light spread over the cracked walls of the temple, and as it touched her, Miss Fortune cried out as the deathly numbness in her flesh was banished in a rush of heat and life.

The light of Nagakabouros closed on Hecarim, and Miss Fortune saw his fear at the thought of what transformations it might work upon him.

What could be so awful that it was better to remain cursed?

“You can be free, Hecarim,” said Illaoi, her voice strained to the limits of endurance by what she had unleashed. “You can move on, live in the light as the man you always dreamed of being before his grief and folly remade you.”

Hecarim roared and swept his glaive at Illaoi’s neck.

Miss Fortune’s blade intercepted it in a clashing flare of sparks. She shook her head.

“Get out of my city,” she said.

Hecarim’s blade drew back for another strike, but before the blow could land, the light finally pierced his veil of darkness. He bellowed in pain and fell back from its burning touch. The dark rider’s outline shimmered, like two picture box images wavering in candlelight on the same backcloth.

Miss Fortune caught a fleeting glimpse of a tall rider, armored in silver and gold. A young man, handsome and proud with dark eyes and a future of glory ahead of him.

What happened to him?

Hecarim roared and galloped from the temple.

His death knights and the darkness went with him, a shrieking host of tattered spirits following in their wake.

The light of Nagakabouros spread over Bilgewater like the coming dawn. None who saw it could ever remember so sweet a sight; the first rays of sunlight after a storm, the first hint of warmth after a bitter winter.

The Black Mist withdrew before it, roiling in a churning maelstrom of panicked spirits. The dead turned on one another in a frenzy, some fighting to return from whence they had come as others actively sought out the light’s release.

Silence fell as the Black Mist drew back over the ocean, drawn to the cursed island where it claimed dominion.

True dawn broke over the eastern horizon, and a cleansing wind blew through the city as the people of Bilgewater let out a collective breath.

The Harrowing was over.

Silence filled the temple; the utter lack of sound a stark contrast to the mayhem of moments ago.

“It’s done,” said Miss Fortune.

“Until the next time,” said Illaoi wearily. “The Black Mist’s hunger burns like a sickness.”

“What did you do?”

“What I had to.”

“Whatever it was, I thank you.”

Illaoi shook her head and put a powerful arm around Miss Fortune’s shoulder.

“Thank the goddess,” said Illaoi. “Make an offering. Something big.”

“I will,” said Miss Fortune.

“You better. My god dislikes empty promises.”

The veiled threat rankled, and for a moment she thought of putting a bullet through the priestess’ skull. Before she could do more than inch her hand to her pistols, Illaoi crumpled like a ripped topsail. Miss Fortune grabbed for her, but the priestess was too enormous to hold upright alone.

They went to the seashell floor together.

“Rafen, help me get her up,” she said.

Together they propped Illaoi up against a broken pew, grunting with the effort of shifting her colossal bulk.

“The Bearded Lady rose from the sea...” said Rafen.

“Don’t be stupid all your life,” said Illaoi. “I said Nagakabouros doesn’t live under the sea.”

“So where does she live?” asked Rafen. “In the sky?”

Illaoi shook her head and punched him in the heart. Rafen grunted and winced in pain.

“There is where you find her.”

Illaoi grinned at the obliqueness of her answer and her eyes drifted closed.

“Is she dead?” asked Rafen, rubbing his bruised chest.

Illaoi reached up and slapped him.

Then started snoring like a stevedore with lung-blight.

Lucian sat on the edge of the bridge and watched the city emerge from Black Mist. He’d hated Bilgewater on first sight, but there was a quality of beauty to it as the sunlight bathed its myriad clay-tiled roofs in a warm amber glow.

A city reborn, like it was every time the Harrowing receded.

An apt name for this dread moment, but one that carried only a fraction of the sorrow of its origins. Did anyone here really understand the real tragedy of the Shadow Isles?

And even if they did, would they care?

He turned as he heard footsteps approaching.

“It’s kind of pretty from up here,” said Miss Fortune.

“But only from up here.”

“Yes, it’s a viper’s nest alright,” said Miss Fortune. “There’s good people and bad people, but I’ve been making sure there’s a lot less of the bad.”

“The way I hear it, you started a war,” said Lucian. “Some might say that’s like burning down your house to kill a rat.”

He saw anger touch her, but it passed quickly.

“I thought I was making things better for everyone,” she said, straddling the parapet, “but they’re only getting worse. I need to do something about that, starting now.”

“Is that why you were out in the Black Mist?”

The woman thought for a moment.

“Maybe not at first,” she said. “I let a razor-eel off the hook when I killed Gangplank, and if I don’t take hold of it and get it back on, it’s going to bite a lot of the good people.”

“A razor-eel?”

“What I mean to say is that when I brought the Pirate King down, I had no idea what would happen when he was gone. I didn’t much care,” she said. “But I’ve seen what’s happening down there without someone in control. The city’s tearing its own throat out. Bilgewater needs someone strong at the top. No reason that someone can’t be me. The war’s just starting, and the only way it’ll end quickly is if I win it.”

The silence between them stretched.

“My answer is no.”

“I didn’t ask anything.”

“You’re going to,” said Lucian. “You want me to stay and help you win your war, but I can’t. Your fight isn’t my fight.”

“It could be,” said Miss Fortune. “The pay’s good and you’d get to kill a lot of bad people. And save a lot of innocent souls.”

“There is only one soul I need to save,” said Lucian. “And I won’t save it in Bilgewater.”

Miss Fortune nodded and held out her hand.

“Then I’ll say farewell and good hunting,” she said, standing and dusting her britches. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. Just know that you can lose yourself to revenge.”

Lucian watched her limp back to the sagging ruins of the temple as the survivors within emerged, blinking, into the daylight. She thought she understood what drove him, but she hadn’t the first clue.

Vengeance? He was far beyond vengeance.

His beloved was held in torment by an undying wraith, a creature from ancient days that understood suffering like no other.

Miss Fortune did not understand even a fraction of his pain.

He rose and lifted his gaze out to sea.

The ocean was calm now, an emerald green expanse.

People were already moving down on the docks, repairing ships and rebuilding their homes. Bilgewater never stopped, even in the aftermath of the Harrowing. He scanned the forest of swaying masts, looking for a ship that wasn’t too badly damaged. Perhaps one desperate captain could be persuaded to take him where he needed to go.

“I am coming, my light,” he said. “And I will free you.”

The fisherman grunted as he worked the stern-windlass to haul the big man from the water and onto his boat. The rope was frayed and he sweated in the cold air as he worked the crank.

“By the bristles of her bearded chin, you’re a big bastard, right sure ye are,” he said, snagging the big man’s armor with a gaffing hook and pulling him around over the rolling deck. He kept a wary eye out for predators, above and below the surface.

No sooner had the Black Mist withdrawn over the horizon than scores of boats put out to sea. The waters were awash with plunder, and if you weren’t fast, you ended up with nothing.

He’d spotted the floating man first and had already fought off six sewer-jacks trying to reach him. Damned if wharf-scum like them were going to steal this ocean bounty from him.

The big man had been drifting on a bed of what looked like the remains of a giant Krakenwyrm. Its tentacles were pulped and bloated with noxious gasses, which was all that had kept the big man’s armored form afloat.

He dropped his catch to the deck and laid him out along the gunwale before casting an appraising eye over his body.

A heavy iron hauberk of ring and scale, rugged, fur-lined boots and, best of all, a magnificent axe tangled in the straps of his armor.

“Oh, yes, make a few Krakens out of you, me beauty,” he said, dancing a happy jig around his boat. “A few Krakens indeed!”

The big man coughed up brackish seawater.

“Am I still alive?” he asked.

The fisherman stopped his happy jig and slid a hand towards the long knife at his belt. He used it to open fish bellies. No reason he couldn’t use it to open a throat. Wouldn’t be the first time a salvager had helped someone on their way to the Bearded Lady to claim a prize.

The big man opened his eyes.

“Touch that knife again and I’ll cut you into more pieces than that damned Krakenwyrm.”

A hero is anyone who answers the call to do what must be done.

They sacrifice so much because of a singular truth: this fragile world requires protection.

This means everything to Lissandra, who rarely rests, especially not on nights like tonight, when stars align in strange ways. The round apex of her private sanctum features many rune-inscribed windows to harness the powers from various celestial syzygies.

Thousands of dark, coffin-like ice formations protrude from the snow-carpeted ground. They rise like great black teeth, jutting up from the depths below, poised to devour the sky. She knows exactly how far down these boulders descend, where their roots terminate, and their purpose.

Lissandra strolls through this unique structure. Under this alignment of the Frost Moon and the Cold Star, she sees more without eyes than anyone who has ever dared set foot in this sacred space. Although it is quiet as a tomb, she hears what no one else can—the voices of the half-dreaming and half-dead trapped within each crystalline monolith.

An ancient troll-king says nothing. Its deep-set eyes scream with malice as it tracks her path. When she passes out of sight, the troll-king’s growl shakes its black ice keep.

Lissandra counts thirteen steps from the troll-king to her knight in rusty armor. Tonight, he speaks first.

“Kill the Ice Witch!” he says. His eyes half-lidded, his grim face stoic. His teeth are broken from decades of gnashing.

But his refrain catches on, as Lissandra winds through the forest of midnight ice.

“Kill the Ice Witch,” becomes a rousing chorus, with voices from across the world, all suspended in stasis, reliving the moment they killed said Ice Witch.

As for the Ice Witch herself, she finds it beautiful when such a diverse crowd rallies behind a single course of action. Their tortured nightmares lull others to sleep. Tonight, though, one voice is peculiarly silent.

Lissandra weaves her way through the crevasses between crystals, toward one of the most exotic heroes in her collection. Silence breeds mysteries, and she loves coaxing secrets from unspeaking lips... She feels a shift in temperature, an aura of warmth.

She is not alone. Someone uninvited walks her menagerie. Her footfalls are whispers on the snow as she follows the trail of warmth.

“Frozen tongues have no place here,” Lissandra says.

“Release my sister, witch!” a voice, gruff and husky, cries out.

Lissandra turns toward this unseen threat. Up, is all she has to think for blade-like shards of ice to erupt from the ground, blocking the intruder’s path. She hears wind gush from the infiltrator’s lungs. Then the soft thud of the fall.

“Demands without a greeting make for ill-mannered guests.”

The would-be interloper finds a shred of courage, then her voice.

“M-My sister is Hara from the Caravanserai of Gilded Scarabs. She dreamt of eight hundred years of ice unless she slew the Prophetess of Frost.” The girl mustered some defiance. “Release my sister, witch, and I shall spare your life.”

Lissandra finds no need to waste good breaths on a pitiful laugh.

“Ah, you seek a bargain, then.”

Lissandra runs her bony fingers across the surface of Hara’s casing and listens to the voice trapped within. The guest’s name dances on Hara’s tongue, and now on Lissandra’s as well.

“You ignored your sister’s command, Marjen. You abandoned the caravanserai.”

Marjen recoils from hearing her name on the Ice Witch’s tongue.

“How do you—”

“We are similar. I too deplore the pleas of unwise sisters.”

“Release her now, or I will end you.”

Marjen brandishes a blade that warms the bitter cold. It reeks of familiar and particularly hard-headed magic. Forged by an older spirit whose name Lissandra erased from the Freljord’s memory.

“Consider the Ice Witch’s offer. I shall relieve you of that warm dagger, and in return, reunite you with your dear sister Hara.”

The alignment of the Frost Moon with the Cold Star completes itself. Lissandra cannot see the shimmering pale blue light descending on the grotto. She wonders how it looks to this woman, born in the Great Sai.

Marjen nods in agreement.

“You are smarter than almost everyone here.” Lissandra’s blue lips stretch into a crooked smile.

“Kill the witch!” Hara screams from inside her own dark prison. Marjen’s heart beats out of time.

And her arm follows through. The blade arcs through the cold air. It plunges into Lissandra’s chest.

“You listened to your sister...”

Lissandra slumps to her knees, then topples over. Silently falling snow shrouds her body.

Marjen turns to Hara, encased in cracked ice. Its surface runs slick with brackish meltwater. Dark water pools on the white snow. Whatever magic that held her ebbs.

“Remember when mother taught us to sand-dance? Follow the heat with the soles of your feet. Follow the heat, Hara. Follow me.”

The cracks widen in Hara’s prison as she struggles to break free. Finally, the edifice crumbles and there she is, kneeling by Marjen’s side in an inky puddle. Relief sweeps both their faces as they embrace.

“We did it,” Marjen says. “The caravanserai is safe. There is no eight-hundred-year freeze coming.”

Hara pulls closer, and whispers in Marjen’s ear.

“Sisters who listen...” Instead of Hara’s voice, she hears the cold, calm voice of the Ice Witch. “...are the easiest to trick.”

Marjen breaks their embrace. Hara’s eyes widen at the words pouring out of her mouth. Her lips mouth a single word.

Run.

Only Marjen can’t. Her fur-lined leather boots have iced over, freezing her to the ground. Black ice crawls up their legs.

“I-I killed...” She looks to Lissandra’s body, but sees only virgin snow. That’s when she sees the blade still in her hand.

The realization dawns on Marjen.

“I never threw the knife.”

A flash of chalk-white catches her attention. She looks up to the rune-inscribed window above. Where there should be a Frost Moon over a Cold Star, a pair of dark blue lips stretch into a mocking grin.

“Sisters,” Lissandra whispers to the two women inside their frozen tombs, “inseparable, devoted, but still so utterly foolish...”

Marjen and Hara, their arms wrapped around each other in a sisterly embrace that turns to terror. They lock eyes as the dark ice entombs their faces.

Lissandra admires her latest acquisition. “I found it more convenient to lose mine.”

Where a single rock of black ice once stood, two now stand, joined together at the base. Sisters perpetually reunited—Marjen and Hara from the Great Sai, their bond stronger than the distance between tundra and desert. A reunion so powerful, Lissandra tastes the satisfaction of the feasting monsters below. The illusions cast by the dreams of the sisters, projected through ice, will keep the beasts slumbering a little while longer.

How exhausting this work is, lulling monsters to sleep.

Tonight, Lissandra too may rest. For the hero protects this fragile world just a little bit longer.