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She cannot breathe.

Her eyes are open, but there is nothing but a heavy, suffocating blackness. It crushes down on her. Her breath smothering. She draws in a slow, rasping breath. It fills her nose with the scents of blood and offal, a slaughterhouse stink. There is something else too, something thin, caustic, and sharp, coiling its way toward her lungs.

The weight around her shifts. She hears something heavy tumble away, the muffled sound of lifeless limbs slapping into mud. The darkness wanes in patches, giving texture to her prison. Bloodied rags. Shattered plate. Cold, abused flesh.

Bodies. She is buried under bodies.

The urge to fight, to escape and survive, rises all-consuming. Adrenaline rushes through exhausted veins. She struggles, wrenching from side to side to force a cavity between herself and the mass. She sees a hairline crack, the faintest trickle of light spilling in. Hope feeds her frenzy. She scratches and claws. Eyesight blurring, rasping breath as she tears the gap wider.

Her hand punches free. Cold air floods in, gulping it into her lungs, but that toxic, bitter something comes with it again. She gags as it coats her tongue, spilling down her throat. She pushes out an arm, beginning to haul herself out.

Her head and arm are free. Gasping for breath but her lungs are twin lanterns ablaze. She can see the ground churned to mire, patches of it burning azure and silver, strewn with the dead. A felled tree’s trunk reaches out for its lost branches, the leaves screaming in tongues. The battle is over.

She glimpses shapes wandering through pale, boiling fog. Creatures gather in the aftermath, wicked birds and gaunt dogs. The dead are carrion now. The vanquished, food.

There is a body just ahead of her, the one she had heard fall away from atop the mound. A boy sprawled out on the ground, his armor broken open, the protection it once offered him gone.

A dog feeds. The boy shudders like a marionette from the roving muzzle. She tries to shout, to drive the beast away, but razors line her throat. The fog covers everything in its acrid and corrosive touch. The boy’s head lolls to the side, the eyes meeting hers glazed over and lifeless.

Then he blinks.

Arrel sat up, placing her hands against the ground to stop her head from spinning. The smell of wet earth and grass asserted themselves over the blood and sour air of the dream. Rainwater trickled down through gaps in the tent over her head.

She looked to her side and found Second sitting there, watching Arrel intently with her helm in his jaws. She stared at the drakehound for a moment, blinking away the afterimages of a starving beast’s maw lined with gore. She gestured, and he padded closer, releasing the helmet into her hands as the flap to the tent was pulled open a fraction.

“Mistress,” came a familiar voice from outside. “It’s time.”

Arrel replaced the helm, taking a slow, rasping breath and ignoring the pain it stitched down into her lungs before standing up. The damp fabric of her bedroll squelched beneath her feet as she stooped to leave her tent and stepped out into the rain. First trailed behind the tracker, joining the other three of the pack that waited outside as they followed obediently in her wake.

Erath stepped back from the tent, eyeing Arrel carefully. Hers had not been a silent sleep, and they had been getting worse since they had left Fae’lor.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Strike the tent,” the tracker replied. Arrel looked out across a small clearing in the wooded hills they had chosen to make camp, shrouded in a gentle rain that glittered and shone with every color of the rainbow. Some of the drops struck the ground as rain should, others winked in the air like tiny stars, dissolving in a mote of light with the soft chime of a distant bell.

She hated Ionia, and it pursued Arrel even into her dreams. She could swear, grasping back at the images, that Riven’s body was among the dead. It would have been so much simpler, if that were true.

Arrel looked back over her shoulder at Erath. “Has she kept the scent?”

The blade squire nodded once. “The runesmith’s blade still sings to her.”

“Then I’ll range ahead,” said Arrel, already walking.

“No need,” said Erath. “Teneff and I found a village up nearby, we aim to stop there for supplies.”

Arrel grunted, fists clenching as she came to a halt. “We ought to avoid them. We are not welcome here.”

“Our provisions are growing scarce,” said Erath. “Teneff and I will go alone. She thinks Marit, Henrietta, and your hounds will attract attention we don’t desire. We shall return quickly and then be on our path again.”

After a few moments, Arrel gave a nod.

Erath did not know the name of the village. Like so much of Ionia, he simply assumed it would be something unknowably poetic, like a secret whispered between friends he could neither hear nor understand.

He had thought the rain would make it easier to conceal themselves. The group of them had discarded as much Noxian gear as possible when they left Fae’lor, to avoid notice of both the locals and the empire as they conducted their mission, but they were still strangers in a strange land. As he followed Teneff down the muddy thoroughfare of the village, Erath felt every pair of eyes on him, dissuading him of any pretense of camouflage.

“Stay close to me,” said Teneff, her gruff tones affecting a calm Erath attempted to adopt, though he didn’t feel it. Both of them were armed, but that was not unusual for anyone in Navori. Though Erath was beginning to come to the realization that not every weapon was one that he could see.

“Hold on,” whispered Teneff, and the pair faded back to lean against the wall of a tea house. There was a scuffle developing ahead, a handful of warriors edged in red surrounding an Ionian elder. A small crowd of onlookers was gathering.

“What are they doing here?” said Erath, his eyes locked to the Noxian soldiers.

“We have an outpost not far to the south,” said Teneff quietly. “This might just be a patrol, or a reprisal sweep if we got hit in the night by a Brotherhood raid.”

The pair moved closer, skirting around the periphery of the people who were watching the confrontation. Erath tugged his hood down further over his head, his fingers brushing against the bone pendant around his neck, then down to check the short blade at his belt. They stopped once they came close enough for the shouting to become words.

“I come from festival,” the old man was trying to explain, his lips fighting to pronounce the Va-Noxian. “In Weh’le.”

“Weh’le,” repeated the lead soldier. “That’s pretty far.” He eyed a paper-wrapped bundle the old man held.

“T-tea.” The Ionian clutched the parcel to his chest protectively. “This tea, this blossom tea.”

The soldier’s eyes narrowed. “All the way to Weh’le and back, for tea?”

“I’ve heard of that festival,” remarked another of the Noxians. “It’s their death feast.”

“Celebrating war heroes?” The lead Noxian took a step closer to the man. “Reminisce a little, dig up some old hurts—people can get crazy ideas in their heads doing that.”

“Like setting fire to a stockade last night,” offered another soldier.

“Nothing like that,” said the Ionian. Suddenly the packet he carried glimmered with a faint blue light. The Noxians sprang into combat postures, leveling their blades at the Ionian.

“That is magic,” barked the lead soldier. “That is a weapon!”

“No! This, this,” the old man struggled to find the words. “Ezari! Ezari, my… son. My wife, too old to go. I bring back for her, to see him.”

“More lies,” snarled a Noxian.

“Yeah, yeah, just like before,” another soldier hissed, her eyes glazed over with the scars of a hateful memory. “You all make nice, wait ’til our backs are turned before you whisper some curse and then boom! Boyod bursts into flame, Iddy’s legs gone, my friend Kron’s heart turned to salt in his chest! That’s what you do!”

“This is getting ugly,” murmured Erath. “What should we do?”

“Nothing,” answered Teneff, still brutally calm. “Not our fight.”

“Surrender the weapon,” snarled the lead Noxian, the haft of his axe creaking in his grip.

“Is no weapon,” the elder pleaded. He looked to the crowd, but their eyes were fixed on the blades carried by a dozen Noxian soldiers, and they did nothing to help him.

“You heard him,” barked another soldier. She advanced, snatching at the parcel. The two struggled over it, and Erath heard the sound of paper tearing.

The Ionian cried out, wordless anguish spilling from his lips as the tea scattered across the ground. He tried to save a measure of it, but the rain was already sweeping it from him.

“Ezari…” croaked the old man as he sank to his knees, watching the tea disintegrate into the mud. Every raindrop that struck the powdered leaves elicited a pulse of radiant blue, each successive one growing fainter and fainter until it finally washed away.

“Try something,” said the lead soldier to the crowd as the Noxians joined ranks and began to edge their way back. “Please. I’ll burn all this to ashes.”

“Xiir!” the Ionian shrieked, his face turned up into the rain. “Xiir!”

Erath felt a hand grip his shoulder.

“We are leaving,” said Teneff, not taking her eyes from the soldiers as they marched the opposite way.

“Do you see those Ionians?” said Erath. “Our comrades won’t make it out of this town alive.”

“Not our fight,” Teneff said again. “You can sympathize for them on an empty stomach, blade squire. Now we’ll have to make due on the trail.”

“That word he was screaming,” said Erath, looking back over his shoulder as he followed after Teneff. “What does it mean?”

“Xiir,” Teneff repeated. “It is a curse that they use for those of us that come from ‘the Captive Lands’. It means locust.”

Tifalenji was waiting for them just outside of the village. The runesmith’s sword was drawn, and faint traceries of emerald light ghosted across the surface of the blade.

“What was all that?” she asked.

“Our outpost near here got hit last night,” said Teneff. “Probably the Navori Brotherhood. Looks like the warleader there sent out troops to track down leads, or just cause trouble for the locals.”

The runesmith absorbed her words for a moment. “Were you seen?”

“No,” Teneff replied. “And from reading the town, it didn’t seem wise to linger and seek out barter.”

“There speaks wisdom,” Tifalenji nodded. “Let us be off then.”

Erath accepted the reins for Talz, the group’s hulking basilisk, from the runesmith. Patting the side of the creature, he glimpsed Arrel and her drakehounds. The tracker looked haggard to him, but he had learned better than to pry.

“Where is Marit?” asked Teneff.

“She said that waiting for you all was boring, so she rode ahead,” said Tifalenji.

For a while they walked in silence, trudging through the ankle-deep mud and shimmering rain. Erath thought back to the village and the sequence of events that had unfolded. The anger, hatred, and fear he had seen on the faces of the Noxian soldiers. His hand strayed to the bone pendant around his neck.

“Teneff?”

The veteran looked back at him. “What’s on your mind?”

“It’s just, those villagers, all the Ionians. How can we convince them to join the empire like that?”

Teneff’s aspect darkened. She stopped, allowing Erath to catch up to her. “Do not judge your fellow Noxians, boy, until you have endured what they have endured, and seen what they have seen.”

Erath looked at Teneff.

“Each of them came here to bring the promise of the empire to those who they would call brethren,” she continued, “just as we did across Valoran, and in Shurima. This land is… different. It lays a great challenge upon the soul of every soldier in service to Noxus. We all strive to enlighten these people, to draw them to us and enrich us all by doing so, but it is not always a simple thing. Ionia is very much not a simple thing.”

“So much is different here,” Erath agreed. “Do Ionians really turn into flowers when they die?”

Tifalenji grunted. “A spirit blossom. The souls of the dead inhabit them, and when they bloom they call out to the living, if what I have been told is true.”

“That holds with what I know,” said Teneff.

“Is it only Ionians who inhabit the blossoms?” Erath asked Teneff.

“I know not, why?”

Erath reached under his jerkin, and took his pendant off. “During the war, all the fighters in our tribe came here. For years we heard nothing, until one day a woman came with this.” He held out the sliver of bone in his hands, lifting it up to show Teneff. “This is all that she said is left of my father. I wonder, could he be in one of the blossoms? Is his spirit still here, and could I find him?”

“Even if there were,” Tifalenji interjected, “we have no time for such fancies. I need you focused now. Remember why you are here, blade squire. The purpose each of us is bound to carry out. Put all else from your mind.”

Erath lowered his head. Unlike Tifalenji and the huntresses, his own purpose here felt elusive, a hard thing to balance against something as absolute as desertion. He dragged a thumb over the surface of the pendant. “Yes, mistress.”

Teneff looked back over her shoulder. “If your father died here, then he died a hero for Noxus. That is all that matters.”

Erath nodded, slowly slipping the cord and the pendant back around his neck.

Does the rain here ever stop?

Erath hauled one foot out of the mud, fighting to keep the mire from sucking the boot off him and only partially succeeding. Bouncing on one foot, he reached down to tug his boot up, shivering and at complete odds with the world surrounding him.

The shimmering color of the rainfall made everything like a dream in a wavering, queasy way. He heard creatures make calls from the branches of trees the color of summer sunsets, sounds that didn’t seem like they could come from an animal. Maybe it was the trees themselves that were calling, as their leaves waxed and waned from orange to indigo.

It was all so unreal.

The only thing that felt truly real to Erath at that moment was the grumbling of an empty stomach. He wished they had managed to barter with the villagers before the soldiers had rendered their chance impossible. The whole scene had sat wrong with him, scattering his mind with jagged, uncomfortable thoughts. Is that how war was fought here? Was that how his father had fought it?

Erath’s boots struck hard ground, and he breathed out a moment’s relief at the prospect of being free of the mud. He stretched the muscles in his arms as he led Talz forward across the stretch of pale stone ahead of them.

As he walked, Erath took notice of the ground, seeing subtle shapes and lines that were somehow familiar to him. There was something intentional about the rock beneath his feet. An artfulness, even. His eyes grew wide.

They were walking across a pair of cupped hands rendered from stone, half buried in the earth. Much of them was hidden beneath the surface, but the palms alone were wide enough to span a courtyard. Erath wondered about the size of the person they would be connected to, and where they might have come from.

“I would like to know how anyone could make such a thing,” said Erath.

“I’m rather more keen to know who could have destroyed it,” replied Tifalenji, her face stern as her gaze drifted over the scars and fissures where immense fingers had once been. “Or what.”

“Hold,” Arrel warned, a low guttural chorus of snarls issuing from her hounds.

She pointed.

There was something lying in the center of the hands. It was a small shape, mewling softly in the rain. Erath pawed water from his eyes, squinting as he went nearer to it. Every time he blinked it was a different color.

“Careful,” said the runesmith. Her eyes were on their surroundings, wary as she slowly drew her sword in a low rasp of steel.

Curiosity pulled Erath forward. The creature was small, a little less than the length of his falchion’s blade. He glimpsed both feathers and scales, short coiling fronds that grasped feebly at the air and raised nubs that might one day sprout what appeared to be wings. The blade squire knelt, finding himself saying the same phrase he had repeated again and again ever since he had first set foot in Ionia.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” murmured Erath. He reached toward the creature. “Hey, little one. You hungry?”

“No, no, no,” breathed Teneff, her eyes darting to and fro like the runesmith’s. “No, no, no.”

Erath blinked. “But, what if it’s hurt? This is just a baby.”

“Exactly,” Teneff agreed. Erath heard the links of her chain unravel from her arm. “Where do you think the mother is, then?”

Something detached from the trees beside them. The already chilly air grew colder. Erath’s breath caught in his throat as a massive form revealed itself, and the rain began to fall upward.

Like the tiny, helpless thing they had found it was part bird, part beast, and part sea creature. Grown to its full size, though, every facet was heightened to a fully monstrous extent. The baby’s grasping fronds were, on the “mother”, tentacles thick as a man’s arm, the subtle bumps razored talons. Half its form seemed to ripple in and out of solidity, as though it existed only partially in the same reality that Erath did.

A deafening shriek slashed out from the forest of teeth and eyes that could have counted as the thing’s face. Erath cried out in pain, clamping his hands over his ears. The creature beat the rows of multicolored wings upon its back, buffeting Erath away from its progeny.

“Back!” Teneff roared, not to the creature but to Erath. “Keep Talz safe!”

Erath’s falchion was drawn but he did as she said, watching as Teneff spun her chain until it blurred into a blackened spiked arc. Arrel had ghosted behind the thing, her hounds slavering as they waited for her to unleash them. Tifalenji was chanting an uncanny litany that drew blood from her nose as her blade shuddered with emerald light.

The beast screamed again, and was attacked from three sides.

Arrel made a sharp series of hand gestures, and her hounds leapt upon the creature. Fangs and claws tore into its rippling hide. It writhed, twisting and undulating as it fought to shake them loose. The pack was hurled to the ground, but Third came away with a wing in his jaws.

“Fr-ah deh-AHK!” Tifalenji bellowed, her blade trailing a constellation of burning jade as she swung. A pair of tentacles came free in a welter of incandescent blue blood, blurring into smears of dirty light before vanishing with a snap of air pressure. The oozing stumps twitched for a moment before sprouting, each appendage lost replaced by three new ones that formed like the branching limbs of a tree.

Teneff charged. The beast wailed, lashing at her advance and raking the heavy pauldron on her left shoulder with its talons. She dipped her head behind the armor plating as a shower of sparks danced over her. She let loose her chain in a whirl of snapping links and it crashed against its flesh, but was quickly overwhelmed by slithering tentacles. The serpentine appendages pulled, seeking to yank Teneff off her feet, but she dug in her heels and held fast. She spun the short blade in her other hand, driving it into the creature’s flank again and again until the stone became slick with gore.

The beast beat its wings, sending Teneff flying back. Her chain, still embedded in the creature’s side, snapped taut, wrenching her shoulder at an unnatural angle. With a bellow of pain she released her hold on its barbed links, hurtling backward to crash against the stone.

Erath sprang toward Teneff, but was warded off by her outstretched hand. She glared back at him, her face a mask of blood from a gash across her forehead. Tifalenji launched herself at the monster, another incantation flowing from her lips, but she was smashed from the air by a clutch of tentacles.

Every fiber of Erath’s being screamed at him to move, to do something. He shot Talz a glance, and set his jaw. It was time to pull his weight.

Scrambling up the side of the basilisk, Erath took a tight hold of the reins and drove his heels into Talz’s flanks. The beast lumbered forward with a throaty grunt. Erath rode forward, placing himself between the creature and Teneff. A tentacle flicked at his face and he brought up his falchion in a blur of steel, slicing it away.

Blood pounded in Erath’s ears as he deflected another slashing limb, making ready to charge. He pushed forward, slicing into a swarm of tentacles assailing him.

“Stay clear of my manservant, beast!” came a voice from behind the creature.

The sleek, agile silhouette of Lady Henrietta appeared from between the trees. The reptilian steed dashed forward, eager to coat her jewelry in a fresh kill. Seated upon her back, the masked figure of Marit laughed in equal eagerness, the blade of her glaive singing as it cut the air.

With another piercing shriek the creature whirled around to face Marit in a disjointed, boneless spin.

“Yes, that’s the spirit!” She flung out her glaive until she gripped the very end of it. She leaned back, spinning the spear in a wide arc before swinging it in closer. The blade slashed upward alongside the beast, shearing away an entire shoal of tentacles and two wings. The creature recoiled, and Marit hopped up to stand in a crouch on Henrietta’s saddle. Using her weapon for balance, she leapt up into the air before landing on the monster’s back.

Clutching at a tentacle with her free hand, Marit scrambled up atop the beast as it bucked and rolled in a frenzied attempt to dislodge her. With a battle cry she plunged the tip of her glaive down into the base of the monster’s skull, and answered the steaming jets of glowing blood that splashed her with a sharp twist. The creature’s ear-splitting hiss was cut abruptly short as its limbs went slack and it toppled heavily to the ground. The rain fell normally again.

The Noxians collected themselves, joining together in a loose circle around the dead creature. Erath climbed down from Talz’s back, still wary of sheathing his blade as he imagined the beast rising once more.

Marit ripped her glaive loose with a grunt muffled by her leather mask. “I believe I am beginning to grow a touch weary of being your personal savior, runesmith.”

“That creature,” said Tifalenji. “It came from the other realm.”

“Indeed?” Marit raised an eyebrow. “Well, whatever part of it that is in this realm is dead.”

The runesmith looked up at the rider. “When all this is finished, I shall craft you a weapon as savage as your spirit.”

Marit matched her gaze. “I may just hold you to that.”

“Well met, Marit,” Teneff dipped her head.

“Yes,” Erath nodded hastily. “Thank you.”

Arrel said nothing.

“Of course,” Marit’s eyes smiled, and she gave a theatrical bow. “I’ll be damned if I have to endure any more of this adventure without the hired help.” She glanced back at the monster’s corpse. “Do you think this thing is good eating, or bursting with some ghastly poison?”

“You want to try it?” scoffed Arrel. “Be our guest. Only fair as it is your kill, after all.”

“I see,” Marit tilted her head. “What about the little one?”

The Noxians all turned their attention to the smaller creature. Raising its head, the tiny monster trilled. It shivered for a moment before bursting into a cloud of snowflakes, which each then became a sound, and then nothing.

Erath stared at the now empty space, releasing a breath slowly through his nose. “Someone tell me again, why do we want this place?”

“The veil is thin here,” said Tifalenji, cuffing the trickle of blood from her upper lip as she sheathed her sword. “This land teems with the bizarre. Ignore it.”

“This land is nothing but bizarre,” Erath muttered.

Marit stepped gingerly onto the skull of the dead creature, snapping her fingers to draw Henrietta close. Sinking her glaive into the earth, she pushed down on the end of the haft, using it like a vault to swing herself over onto the saddle once more.

“How long have you been up in that saddle, eh?” teased Teneff. “Why don’t you give Lady Henrietta a rest?”

Marit scoffed. “I’m not touching Ionia any more than is absolutely necessary, thank you.”

“Sounds like an awful long time to hold one’s piss,” Teneff grinned.

“Hmm, well I’ve some jars stashed away here somewhere, if you’re in need of a fresh batch?” Marit began to rummage through her saddle pouches. Erath’s shoulders shook as he stifled a laugh.

“Can we not?” asked Tifalenji, looking at both women in exasperation.

Teneff shook her head. “You are no fun, runesmith.”

“No fun at all,” echoed Marit. She looked to Erath, eyes narrowing into slits of cruel slyness.

“Now, manservant, I don’t completely hate you yet, so whilst we are on the subject, a word of warning as you care for Lady Henrietta. Her urine is highly acidic, so no matter how desperate and overcome with thirst you might find yourself on our travels, you must look elsewhere, understand?”

“Why?” Erath chuckled. “Is that what happened to your face?”

Marit visibly tensed. Her eyes flashed wide for an instant, fingers digging into the haft of her glaive. “No,” she said coldly, winding Henrietta’s reins around her free hand and riding off without another word.

The color drained from Erath’s face. “I—”

“Let it be,” Teneff shook her head. “Just bide back a distance from her for a while.”

Erath’s heart sank as he dragged himself back to Talz. After all this time, he had felt the faintest idea of being part of the group, of belonging. Now he felt it spill out between his fingers, like the elder Ionian’s tea.

He had been so close, and he ruined it.

The next week’s trek had been calm, or at least as calm as the wilds of Ionia could be to an outsider. The rains had ceased, and Erath savored marching over dry land for a change. The absence of bone-deep cold and the other miseries brought to a soldier by mud allowed him to truly see the natural splendour of Ionia in all its wondrous, breathtaking glory.

Everything was in subtle motion, from the dancing of the birds to the gentle sway of the multicolored trees. Even the chase between the predator and its prey, glimpsed for only an instant at a time in the spaces between the trees, unfolded in a sort of graceful harmony. It was as though they were all moving in concert to some silent melody that was just beyond Erath’s ability to experience, a wider world he inhabited, but couldn’t see.

They had been proceeding along the course of an immense river ever since they made landfall on Navori, never straying out of sight from its banks for too long. Not only had it served as a source of food and fresh water, but as a guide deeper into the interior, as the huntresses followed the eerie song that radiated from Tifalenji’s blade.

“Night soon,” said Teneff, glancing over at the runesmith.

Tifalenji’s eyes darted up at the swollen silver crescent of the moon, barely visible in the reddening sky. Erath thought he saw a moment of frustration flash across her features, before they become impassive and unreadable once more. “We’ll stop here, then.” She looked at Erath. “Make camp.”

“Second,” murmured Arrel. The hound presented himself. “Find Marit, bring her back.”

Second chuffed and turned, sprinting away into the deepening dusk. Marit had ridden ahead of the group since the incident after killing the creature, the thought sending a twist of regret in Erath’s gut.

“I’ll go get some wood for a fire,” said Erath, drawing a hatchet from where it hung off Talz’s back.

“Take care in how you do,” warned Teneff. “The trees here are alive.”

Erath frowned. “Aren’t all trees alive?”

“She means they’ll-kill-you alive,” said Arrel.

Erath’s frown deepened.

Night had fully descended, wrapping the world in a blanket of twinkling black velvet, by the time Erath had collected enough firewood. After the battle against the creature, he had opted to collect scattered branches from the ground rather than chop a fresh one loose and risk awakening some vicious animus within the tree that would seek one of his limbs to balance the scales.

He returned to the campsite and made a fire. Once he was satisfied the embers were growing into a healthy flame, he slung a cooking pot and weighted net over his shoulder and made for the river. After checking how light their provision sacks had become, he hoped to return to camp with a fish.

The minutes stretched by as he crouched on the river bank, staring into its glassy black surface. His pulse quickened as he saw motion in the water, and he flung out the net, cinching it tight and hauling it back onto land. The net wriggled and leapt with a captive carp.

Breathing out a sigh of relieved triumph, Erath filled the pot with clear river water and dropped the carp inside.

He walked back to camp, his step much lighter than when he had set off as he thanked the fish for its devoted service to the Noxian empire.

“It’s ready,” said Erath as he portioned the soup out in each warrior’s tin cup. He was careful to drag the ladle across the bottom of the pot every time. When he had handed out the last cup he poured what was left for himself, and took a seat near the fire.

For a while no one spoke, each of them content to enjoy the comforts of a hot meal and the crackling warmth of the fire. Erath was no exception, happy to fill his belly and give rest to sore feet and tired muscles.

For that brief span of time, nothing else mattered.

Each of the Noxians did their best to attempt some relaxation. Arrel was surrounded by her hounds, carefully inspecting their claws and teeth. Tifalenji had walked a short distance away, sitting cross legged beneath the light of the moon as she chanted and wrapped her levitating blade in magic. Teneff had taken out a battered pipe, slowly breathing out quivering rings of blue-grey smoke that crackled in the firelight.

“You still use that thing, Ten?” Marit looked down from where she lounged atop Lady Henrietta’s back. “You do know that stuff will kill you.”

Teneff shook her head. “This won’t be what kills me. Besides, I’m not allowing myself to die until this business is done.”

Erath felt everyone’s thoughts coalesce, and cleared his throat. Teneff looked at him.

“This person we’ve been sent to find,” said Erath.

“Riven,” said Arrel softly.

“You all knew her?”

Tifalenji allowed her sword to drop into her hands. “Only by reputation.”

“I shed blood alongside her, when first we came to these shores,” said Teneff, staring into the flames. “Tough little thing, you wouldn’t guess it by looking at her but she could haul a pair of legionaries down to her level, each by an ear. That sword of hers, took incredible strength to even lift it.”

“Let alone the dancing she could do,” added Marit.

Erath noticed the runesmith out of the corner of his eye, regarding Teneff carefully at the mention of the blade. The uncomfortable thought rose in his mind of how little he truly knew about Tifalenji, and how thoroughly his life depended on her now.

“She was quiet at first,” said Marit, “mostly kept to herself.”

“But stand together in the line with someone,” continued Teneff, “forge that bond with iron and blood…”

“You become sisters,” Arrel finished.

Silence descended, the three huntresses lost amidst their thoughts.

“Why did she stay here?” said Marit, a thin edge creeping into the words. “All these years, everything that’s happened. Why did she betray us?”

“We don’t know what happened,” said Teneff.

Marit snorted. “Don’t play the imbecile, Ten. It does not suit you.”

“You think I don’t seek to bring her to account?” Teneff stood and rounded on Marit. “Why else am I here?”

“Years, she’s been here,” Marit replied, unmoving. “Years. Every opportunity to report back, and she didn’t. She is a deserter, and theirs is a weakness we cannot abide. A treachery we cannot forgive. We are here to seek vengeance.”

“Don’t call it vengeance,” said Arrel. “This will be justice.”

“Call it whatever you wish,” Marit replied. “Riven made her choice, and we are the consequence.”

Erath tried to sleep, but despite his exhaustion it eluded him. He had seen the power the huntresses wielded when they worked together. Who was this person who was able to divide them without even being there? Who was Riven, who had left such a mark on each of them?

The questions swirled around his head, though they slowly began to sink down beneath a promise of rest, before it was shattered by a voice.

“Up!”

Erath stirred. It was Teneff, standing watch.

“Get up!” she bellowed again, clanging her short sword against her armor. “The river is flooding!”

The Noxians scrambled to their feet. Erath turned to look at the riverbank, and his blood ran cold.

Something had roiled the current, transforming it from a peaceful flow into a riot of churning rapids. Erath saw human faces take shape in the foaming walls of rushing water, boiling into being and mouthing silent, enraged curses before dissolving back. All the while it rose toward them, devouring the bank inch by inch.

The river wasn’t flooding. It was alive.

“Get to the treeline!” barked Tifalenji.

Teneff was already running. Marit had only to spin into a riding position on Lady Henrietta before they were darting for the trees. Erath’s first thought was Talz.

He hurried to the basilisk, taking hold of whatever he could from the camp as the ground beneath him turned to a marshy quagmire. Water rushed over his boots as he reached the massive reptile. He looked back just in time to see another great swell smash down over Arrel.

And it looked like it had hands.

Prying out the stakes rooting Talz in place, Erath started climbing onto his back before the basilisk charged. Erath clung to the straps and rigging on the beast’s flank for dear life as the water surged after them. He hauled himself up, his legs swinging free, head ducking as equipment, tools and what remained of their food supply tore loose.

They made it to the trees, and Erath climbed as the water battered them. Talz clawed himself up to his hind legs to keep his head above the surface, each fresh surge crashing higher up his back and neck. Erath looked back. Teneff and Marit were clear, but Arrel and her hounds were caught in the swamp their camp had become, slowly being sucked back into the river.

Erath braced as another swell struck him like a hail of stones. The tree next to him sagged, nearly snapping from its trunk. He looked from the tree to back at Arrel, and dropped down into water that reached his waist.

Grabbing the hatchet from Talz, he swung, chopping into the wet bark of the ailing tree. He swore he heard some mournful note rasp from its leaves as it finally broke, smashing down at an angle toward the river. Erath watched a cluster of shapes approach it.

Arrel’s hounds. They were paddling in a circle around her, dragging her up onto the tree. But there were only three of them.

The waters began to recede as the first light of day broke through the foliage in bars of copper and gold. They glittered across the water. A horrific sound, like a dirge being played by a drowning man, filled the air as the tide slid back into the river.

Marit galloped back, and Teneff climbed down, all of them converging on Arrel and the fallen tree. She had followed the bank, scanning the becalmed waters with her pack.

“Second!” she called, pausing. “Second…”

“He was carried beneath the water, Arrel,” said Teneff. She laid a tentative hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

Arrel’s hand shook. She balled them into fists and set her jaw into a hard line.

“We’re wasting time here,” the tracker croaked, shrugging off Teneff’s hand. She stood, sharply gesturing to bring the other hounds from their somber watch on the riverbank. Fourth lingered a second longer than the others, but a glare from Arrel brought him trotting to her.

Erath flinched as the sunlight faded. He held out his hand, feeling heavy drops as they struck his palm. Their short reprieve from the rain was over.

Within minutes the sun was gone, hidden behind heavy black stormclouds. The rain was joined by howling gales, whipping the downpour into twisting sheets of freezing water. The cold sliced through Erath to the bone. He could barely see an arm’s length in front of his face. It even forced Marit to dismount from Lady Henrietta.

Tifalenji held her sword aloft. With a whisper, the blade burst with emerald flame, forcing back the storm’s blinding winds a fraction. Teneff retrieved a length of rope from Talz, looping it around each of their waists to bind them together.

Leaning into the wind and lashing rain, the Noxians wandered forward behind Tifalenji, a tiny capsule of green light in the maelstrom. Time blurred for Erath as he trudged on. He couldn’t tell if it had been minutes or hours before Tifalenji spoke up.

“We have to stop,” she roared over the wind.

“Look!” Marit pointed with her glaive. “There’s light up ahead!”

Erath could make out the faintest cluster of lights, like a constellation in the heavens.

“This is wild country,” warned Teneff. “It could be bandits, or a Brotherhood camp for all we know.”

“Then we kill them all,” hissed Marit. “The rune-witch is right. We have no supplies, and if we do not take shelter, this storm will end us.”

Teneff spat out a mouthful of rainwater, and nodded. Together they fought the storm, putting one foot ahead of the other, until they reached the lights.

The trees overhead formed an overhang, absorbing the worst of the storm. A village materialized before them, small and isolated amidst the woods. It looked like an extension of the forest itself, the tall, thin dwellings appearing woven and sculpted. They could just see them over a wall of intertwined branches barring their way, as though the land itself had formed a stockade. The branches shuddered, peeling apart enough to create a small passage.

A dozen men and women stepped through the opening. They wore hand-spun robes, faces hidden behind hoods raised against the storm. The huntresses noted the axes and swords in their hands, the broad slab-like blades chipped and worn. The battered remnants of armor plating they were clad in.

The huntresses formed a line, with Erath and Talz behind them.

“Those are Noxian weapons,” said Teneff.

“And those are Noxians carrying them,” added Arrel.

As one they sank into battle postures. Arrel’s hounds snarled.

“Lower your weapons,” said the lead villager in perfect Va-Noxian. He pulled back his hood to reveal a scarred face, his dark hair and beard shot through with streaks of silver. “We don’t want a fight.”

“Well, you are deserters,” sneered Marit. She spat upon the ground.

“Remember what’s behind us,” Teneff grumbled under her breath.

“Realize what’s in front of us!” Marit snapped.

“Stop!” Erath pushed his way between the huntresses. There was something about the man, hearing his voice. He stepped forth with trembling hands. He regarded the lead Noxian with wide eyes.

A single tear descended the curve of his cheek.

“Father?”

The man led Erath out of the storm into one of the huts, passing onlookers, Noxian and Ionian alike, their faces expressing a spectrum of shock and anger to fear. Erath followed him, as though in a trance, struggling to believe that this was Jobin, his father.

Alive.

“You look like you’ve missed a meal or two,” said Jobin. The two sat down around a fire pit. Jobin opened a steaming pot, scooping out a measure of rice into a pair of wooden bowls and handing Erath one. “My son, what are you doing here?”

They talked, of Erath’s journey, of home. He omitted much, careful as he spoke with a man he thought was dead.

When they were done, Jobin’s eyes gleamed in the firelight. “Look at you. You’re a man now. My little enhasyi.” He paused. “How is your mother?”

“Still mourning you,” Erath said, trying to keep the bitterness from his voice. He removed the bone pendant from his neck. “Who even is this?”

“Me,” Jobin raised a hand, showing where one finger ended in a stump. “A sacrifice we all sent back, that we hoped might bring you peace.”

“Peace,” Erath exhaled the word.

After weeks traversing a realm of wild magic, of illusion and the uncanny, he had to ask the obvious question.

“Are you real?”

Jobin leaned forward. “What?”

“Are you real?” Erath said again. “Or a spell to make it appear my father is not truly dead? If it is deception I would thank you, I truly would, for all that the alternative would mean.”

For a few moments, neither spoke. The silence stretched.

“The world used to be so small,” said Jobin, finally. “You never knew it. We tended our herds, we traded with our neighbors, we raised families. We had simple lives and we were happy. Then the empire came, and our little world became so much bigger, and so much darker.”

He glanced out the door of the hut. “Being here, seeing this place, it brought me back to that.”

“And that was worth treachery?” asked Erath.

“Against what?” Jobin looked back at him. “Against some distant ruler I would never meet, pushing markers across maps? Those markers are people, Erath. Noxian people, Ionian people. We should have never begun this war.”

“But we are stronger together,” Erath insisted. “Noxus didn’t put us in chains, it set us free. No more herds growing thinner every year, no more raids from those same neighbors. And we can do the same here. You’ve been gone a long time, it isn’t the Noxus you remember. We’ve truly become part of something greater.”

“I don’t believe much has changed,” Jobin shook his head. “We came here believing what you believe, that this place needed Noxus. ’Rath, I don’t think they need our help, and they don’t need our rule, but we can coexist. I didn’t have to kill them, to become family. Once I understood that, I knew I couldn’t return.”

Erath processed his father’s words, and hung his head. “Everything you taught me was a lie.”

“I’m sorry, my son.” Jobin laid a hand on Erath’s shoulder. “I was deceived myself by it. But there is always time for something different. Something better. There is a place for you, here.”

“A lie,” Erath repeated. Slowly, he looked up. “So why should I believe you now?”

Jobin visibly sagged. “My son…”

“No,” Erath’s eyes were hard. “You don’t get to do that. You lost a finger, I lost you! And now you sit there and preach, as you hide in the woods? We had an excuse before we joined the empire, of being blind to the wider world. We don’t have that ignorance anymore. Now you are either working to unite the world, to make it better, or you’re running.”

Erath stood.

“I’m not running.”

Erath and Jobin emerged from the hut. The blade squire looked up, seeing the clouds thinning through the canopy of the trees. The rain had slackened as well.

“Think upon what I’ve said, my son,” said Jobin.

“I have,” Erath replied, stepping away to stand beside the huntresses.

Jobin swallowed, and cleared his throat. “We have offered you shelter. Now that the storm is passing, we will offer you a portion of our harvest. We ask in return only that you leave us in peace, and forget you ever found this place.”

Teneff eyed the runesmith. She tilted her head, and the huntresses stepped back to confer amongst themselves.

“The only question worth asking,” said Marit, “is if we kill them all.”

“His father is among them,” Teneff nodded toward Erath.

“His father is a traitor,” Marit replied.

“He isn’t the only one,” said Arrel. “Close to half of this village are Noxian… or were.”

“Scared of getting your hounds dirty?” Marit ran a finger down the edge of her glaive.

“Slaughtering cowards and villagers finds us Riven how?” the tracker retorted.

Erath looked to Tifalenji. The runesmith held the lives of these villagers—the life of his father—in her hands. For the life of him, Erath couldn’t decide what he wanted her to say, and that more than anything turned his heart to a lead weight in his chest. The huntresses studied her too, trying to parse her impassive features for her judgment.

Teneff rested a hand on her chain. “What’s it to be, then?”

“We move on,” Tifalenji stated. “Our task is to find one deserter, and these are not her.” She eyed Marit. “It is not a discussion.”

“As you wish,” she shrugged, walking back to her mount. Tifalenji looked sternly upon Erath.

“Were the circumstances different, I would not condone leaving them here alive.”

“I understand,” Erath replied.

“Now make haste,” ordered Tifalenji. “Time is against us, and you know what lies ahead.”

The huntresses gathered and began the march out of the village. Erath spared a final look back as they passed through the unfolding stockade, then touched Teneff’s arm. “What lies ahead?”

Her face turned grim, and her eyes distant. “The place where all this started.”

They marched in silence, though troubled thoughts made it feel as though Erath were pushing his way through a crowd. He couldn’t reconcile the man who raised him with the one he discovered living in that village. A son is raised in the image of his father, but does he end up the same person?

The bone pendant around his neck grated against his chest.

The landscape changed, growing more arid and dry, as did the dispositions of the huntresses. Postures stiffened, reflexes had them twitching at the slightest sound, and all three had their weapons drawn, clutched in white-knuckle grips. Erath could smell a faintly acrid tang in the air.

The Noxians crested a hill, and witnessed a dusty expanse of dessicated plains ahead. A marker was erected at the border to the plain, little more than a stone totem marked with Ionian script. He could not decipher it, but the meaning behind it was clear to Erath.

It was a warning, to stay away.

They found an old man sitting by the marker. Quietly he hummed to himself, flicking a necklace of chimes he wore looped around his shoulders. His eyes grew wide as the Noxians approached, and using a cane for support, he slowly pushed himself to his feet.

“Travelers,” he raised a hand. “I have no part in any quarrel, and serve no master. I keep vigil here, at the threshold of a terrible place, to ward off those who might seek to cross.”

The huntresses were silent. Erath had never seen such tension radiating from them. Tifalenji stepped forward.

“We wish no harm to you, gatekeeper,” she said. “But do not seek to bar our passage.”

“I beg you,” the Ionian clasped his tiny hands together, “go no further. You cannot imagine the pain that occurred here.”

“We don’t have to,” answered Teneff, as she walked past.

Erath followed, passing the dejected Ionian by. “I will sing for you,” said the gatekeeper. “For your pain.”

The first step onto the dusty plain, and Erath felt like he had been transported somewhere alien, even for Ionia. It was absolutely devoid of life. The ground had a sickly, greenish tint, and the air was sour, stinging his nose and throat. His eyes and lips tingled.

A profound sense of loss emanated from the earth like a haze, stabbing into Erath.

Teneff stopped, slowly taking in the landscape.

“This is where it happened.”

“It was here,” breathed Tifalenji, the runes along her blade pulsing. She blinked. “She was here.”

“We had been fighting for years,” said Teneff. “Everything ground to a stalemate. They said they had a way to break through, brought us some mad Zaunite and his concoction.”

“Chemical fire,” Arrel murmured.

“Something so caustic it would strip the life out of anything it touched,” said Marit. “We were safeguarding the payload, moving it up to the line, when it all went wrong.”

Erath looked from one huntress to the next as their words flowed over each other.

“We were ambushed…”

“…so many of them…”

“Riven called out for support…”

“They couldn’t have known where we were.”

“They fired—”

“—and the jars ignited.”

Marit reached behind her head, undoing the clasps that kept her mask in place. The straps slackened, came loose, and Erath swallowed.

Her entire face and skull was a mass of hairless, glossy red scar tissue. Erath had seen things killed by burns, the way the flesh looked afterward, but this was different. Black veins threaded the tissue like cobwebs. Erath could not fathom what pain she must endure, even now.

Only her eyes remained unscathed. She looked at Erath, holding his gaze in cold silence.

Arrel removed her own helm. Erath glimpsed wounds around her lips and neck. The tracker hacked and spat a gobbet of blood phlegm.

She must have breathed it in, Erath realized.

“It was chaos,” said Teneff. “Comrades, enemies, boiling away, screaming themselves dead. I never saw Riven again. I believed that she died here, like all the rest.” She looked at Erath. “Do you understand? If we can find her, the thought that we can make something good from all this—”

Then she stopped, her eyes on the horizon. Erath looked, seeing a group of figures appear on the hill. They were Ionian, clad in lightweight armor and festooned with blades of all kinds. Their faces were hidden behind masks and hoods the color of dark iron.

“Calm is the ocean before the storm,” shouted one of the Ionians. “Stand to account, xiir! If any are to control this land, it will be us.”

“Navori Brotherhood,” Teneff bared her teeth, speaking the words like a curse.

“Full warparty,” said Marit, her voice calm and level despite an edge for the violence sure to come.

“The village you stole from,” said the Brotherhood warrior, spreading his arms wide. “They were all so eager to speak of you. To help us fulfill our promise.”

Erath’s blood ran cold.

“We should have killed them,” Marit snarled, rage twisting the ruin of her face as she pulled her mask back on. A light rain began to fall from the iron-gray sky.

“This forsaken rain,” hissed Arrel.

The Brotherhood warrior took a step down the hill. “We promised to find you, the xiir, wherever you might be in the First Lands. We promised to hunt you, stalk you, to cleanse our homeland of those who have destroyed the balance between the twin realms.”

The Ionians roared, raising weapons, many of which coursed and shivered with magic.

“We make these promises to all those you have taken before their time, those whose limbs you have taken, whose peaceful dreams you have stolen and replaced with terror and broken memory. These promises we will keep, so long as our hearts beat life within us!”

A dozen warriors descended the hill, coming within a handful of paces of the Noxians with weapons ready.

“Tell me,” said the Ionian. “What will you promise?”

Teneff breathed, slowly shut her eyes and opened them. “I promise… to make this hurt.”

“You promise blood, then,” the warrior smiled beneath his hood. “We accept.”

Teneff roared, hurling her hooked chain. It struck one of the Brotherhood in the temple. The force of the blow smashed him to the ground. Teneff stomped on his chest, tearing the hook free in a spray of blood. More flecked from the hook as she spun it again.

Arrel flung out her hand and her hounds attacked. First tackled one of them, clamping down around the woman’s neck. The drakehound shook savagely, wrenching her body back and forth until she went limp, then moved on to another.

The two groups closed into melee. Tifalenji thrust her sword into an Ionian’s midsection. She spat a curse and the blade ignited, setting the man ablaze with screaming jade flame. Marit strafed through their midst. Her glaive was a blur, never ceasing as it cut, stabbed and slashed in tandem with Lady Henrietta’s snapping jaws.

Erath watched the opening strikes. This place had awakened something in them, unleashed a rage that they had crushed down deep within themselves for years. The runesmith had waded in, knowing the only way to achieve her goal was to eliminate the Ionians in her way. Talz’s reins slipped from his hand, replaced by his falchion.

Teneff locked blades with the Brotherhood leader, their faces inches apart.

“This ground pains you,” he taunted. “The xiir you lost, would you like to see them again?”

As if on command, a young Ionian who had remained halfway down the hill began to sing. It was a lilting, haunting melody, a tune that no living thing should be able to make. It stilled the Noxians for an instant, the absolute wrongness of it.

Erath’s footing slipped as the earth shook. Tiny things appeared up from the ground, like seedlings but pulsing with a sickly, intermittent unlight. Erath realized after a moment that they were fingers.

Soon hands emerged, arms bursting through the soil. Insubstantial silhouettes of ragged men and women clawed their way up from below, dressed in incorporeal rags of Noxian garb, all radiating the same cold spectral darkness.

“The dead here are not at peace,” hissed the Ionian, grappling with Teneff.

“Madness,” Teneff snarled.

The Brotherhood warrior leapt back, drawing a blade. “And you will join them!”

The youth continued to sing, and more pale phantoms clawed their way up from the earth. Erath found himself surrounded, and slashed out in a wide arc. The spirits boiled away at his blade’s touch, only to resolve like a sickened wind. He struck again, carving an opening to see the wider battle.

The Brotherhood numbers were thinning from the fury of the huntresses, but the dead were massing, dredged back into being by that hellish melody. Erath recoiled, sensing that even these Ionian’s kin would condemn the evil they were unleashing. They had but moments until they were overwhelmed, and it had to be stopped.

He made for the hill. A Brotherhood warrior leapt in his path, wielding a pair of long daggers. Shouting an Ionian curse, he lunged at Erath. The blade squire parried the first dagger going low for his gut, but saw the flash of the second seeking his throat. He backpedaled, losing his balance and falling to the ground.

The Ionian dived atop him. His mask slipped free, revealing a young determined face trying to drive one of the daggers into Erath’s chest. His falchion had slipped from his grasp in the fall. He fought the man, gripping his wrists as the dagger’s tip pierced his flesh. With a roar of pain and anger, Erath rolled, reversing the positions as he drew his knife.

Erath dropped his weight down, driving the knife into the Ionian’s gut. Grunting, he twisted it sharply, and felt the strength leave the Ionian’s grip. Tugging the blade free he collected his falchion and stepped over the dying man.

Rain and blood turned the ground to mire. Erath ran, weaving between clashes of blades and the moaning hordes of lost Noxians reaching for him. Their touch numbed his flesh, as though they were filling his veins with ice water. He gasped for breath as his side was raked by translucent claws.

The singer’s eyes were closed, the lids twitching as he wept blood. Trickles of ruby issued from his nose, ears, and lips as he stood transfixed and dirged. He didn’t see Erath coming. The blade squire surged forward, pushing against cold, grasping hands. He was bent double, crying out in agony as one climbed on top of him. He thrust himself upright, throwing the ghoul back. Breathless, his vision narrowing like a collapsing tunnel, he charged forward and with the last of his strength brought his blade down.

The Ionian’s song fell silent as he collapsed, his lifeblood emptying out from where Erath’s blade had split him from collar to sternum. The phantoms shrieked, their forms elongating as they were drawn violently back down into the earth. Within moments, all that remained of them was a pale, sickly fog, and the echoing cries of the unquiet dead.

Erath turned, stumbling like a drunkard as he returned to the fight still raging below. The Navori Brotherhood warparty was down to their final warriors. They had clearly chosen to die rather than flee, save for one. Arrel’s hounds ran him down, and tore him apart. Lady Henrietta feasted, her jewelry stained crimson. Blood sizzled and snapped where it touched the runes of Tifalenji’s blade.

Erath arrived in time to see Teneff with the leader of the warriors. She had encircled his neck with her chain and drove his face into the quagmire, a boot on his back as she watched him suffocate.

All of them bled from a dozen wounds. Teneff looked up at Erath as he approached. She stood up straight sharply, snapping the Ionian’s neck, and stumbled back. She sank to one knee, overcome by the bone-deep exhaustion of prolonged fighting hand to hand.

Erath looked down. The earth fizzed and fumed wherever blood had seeped into it. His skin burned from the dust, already reddened and peeling.

“Insanity,” snapped Marit, flinging blood from her glaive. “Ionians claim to revere the dead, and yet do this?”

“We aren’t their dead,” murmured Arrel. “Even still…”

“Insanity,” Marit repeated.

“We can’t stay here,” panted Tifalenji. “The toxin is still in the ground. And who knows what further ruin their necromancy has wrought.” She stood beside Teneff.

“I had almost hoped to see Riven among them,” she said, looking up at the runesmith. “I had wished that you were wrong.”

The runesmith offered her hand. “I am not.”

After a moment, Teneff took it.

For once the rain was a blessing. Cool and cleansing, it washed the blood and poisoned earth from their bodies as they left the site of the chemical attack behind. They could all see the runesmith’s sword was shining now, humming to her.

“She’s close,” Tifalenji whispered, eyes locked to the runes. “So very close.”

She nodded to Marit and Arrel, and the two began ranging ahead.

Erath felt his chest as they walked. Gingerly avoiding his dagger wound, he pulled his pendant out from under his jerkin, rubbing a thumb slowly over its surface. “He gave us up. My father gave us up.”

“He may have been coerced,” said Teneff. After a while she shook her head. “It doesn’t really matter.”

“I was only a child. They told me that he died, he’s gone, he’s never coming back, I’ll never see him again. Then I do see him, and everything I knew about him was a lie.” He looked at Teneff, taking a shaking breath. “What do I do with that?”

Teneff reflected for a moment. “You can let him go.”

Erath cuffed away a tear. “How does that help, after everything?

“It’s not about helping everything.” She gripped his shoulder. “Just you. So long as Noxus endures, you will always have a family, Erath.”

Erath paused. He let the words and memories of the past days wash over him. Exhaling, he pulled at the pendant until the cord around his neck snapped. He stared down at it, and slowly tilted his palm until the sliver of bone fell to the ground.

Without looking back he jogged off to catch up to the others, as the pendant quickly vanished beneath the earth.

“Is anything you just heard unclear to you?”

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

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

“All is clear,” she answered.

“Excellent.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You, however, can be.”

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

Fortitude. Discipline. Resolve.

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

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

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

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

And more after them, and on, and on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Khosis g’vyar!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Literate?”

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

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

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

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

“No, mistress,” Erath shook his head.

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

Erath saluted again. “Yes, mistress.”

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

“May I ask a question, mistress?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why am I here, runesmith?”

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

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

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

“Sheep,” Erath answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s there?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Focus!” she hissed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stood there. Help them, you idiot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now,” answered Tifalenji.

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

He hesitated. “Uh, I’m a blade squi—”

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

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

“What does she eat?” asked Erath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He did,” said Arrel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s left of it,” muttered Arrel.

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

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

All of their spears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The open air was cold, and sharp with salt spray. Twelve other ships sailed beside the Atoniad in the squadron, their red sails full and taut with a generous wind that at least for now handled the duty of the oarsmen below decks. Gossip aboard amongst bored soldiers had spread the rumor that they had passed through pirate routes at some point the previous night, though few of them could imagine any corsair fool enough to try their luck against a dozen Imperial warships packed from bow to stern with war-edgy killers.

Erath turned from looking out across the squadron as Arrel approached, nearly saluting before remembering he had been told not to. Arrel ignored the awkwardness. She glanced down, noting how tightly the boy held on to the railing. “Your first passage?”

The blade squire nodded. “Three days at sea, and still another three, they say, until we get to Fae’lor.” He waved a hand at the endless span of churning grey waves stretching all the way to the horizon, broken only by the salt-shrouded shapes of the other warships. “I never thought there could be this much water.”

Arrel grunted, noncommittal.

“You were in the war before,” Erath said, uneasy with the subject. “Ionia, what is it like?”

Arrel did not answer him at once. The tracker stared out over the ocean, reaching down to scratch the sleek, leathery skin behind Second’s bony crestmask. She breathed slowly. “It is a place of beauty, and of death.”

“All of Ionia is just one giant jungle raptor with its head cut off,” Marit appeared from behind them, strutting forward to lounge against the railing. “We decapitated it last time, and now it’s just thrashing about, making a mess, too stupid to realize it’s already dead.”

“I’ve hunted raptors,” said Arrel. “And even headless they can still gut you.”

“So it is war, then?” asked Erath. “Another war with Ionia?”

Marit shrugged. “Damned if I know, but the Grand General sure shoved a lot of boots across the ocean just to rattle swords. Just hope he has enough backbone to let us finish what we start, this time.”

Arrel walked away, and Erath looked back at the fathomless expanse of gently crashing waves. “What is the name of this ocean?” he asked.

“Who cares what it’s called?” Marit leaned over Erath’s shoulder before she stalked off. “It’s ours.”

Erath had never been so grateful to see dry land.

The fortress of Fae’lor grew in size and definition on the horizon before them. The Atoniad had made speed in her voyage to the island, but Erath had discovered he was far from suited for a life on the seas. The heaving, rolling motion of their warship had stolen many meals from his stomach, offered to the ocean in the queasy tribute of abrupt sickness. Everything was soaked, coated in a crackling crust of salt that burned his skin.

He had kept below decks for the most part, ensuring that the creatures in his care endured the passage with as much comfort as he was able to offer. Talz seemed fine, eating regularly and spending the majority of the time in his pen, sleeping. Lady Henrietta, however, had required more diligent attention. A nimble and energetic beast, Marit’s steed was clearly unhappy with the confines of the ship. Erath took extra care during her feedings, to ensure he did not become the meal himself, and looked forward to getting Henrietta off the Atoniad where she could stretch her legs.

When the call for land had gone out from the scouts at the ship’s bow, Erath hurried above decks to see. The top deck was crowded with Noxians eager for their own view. At first it was little more than a smudge in the distance, faintly more defined than the hazy stripe where the water met the sky, but the closer they came, the more distinct it grew. Erath glimpsed what appeared to be banks of fog surrounding the island, tinted a ruddy brown that upon closer inspection became red.

Fae’lor was surrounded by Noxian ships.

There were concentric circles of vessels ringing the island, defense pickets that were constantly shifting. The Atoniad was halted by the outermost patrols, a pair of frigates that lashed themselves to the larger vessel with boarding hooks as squads of naval soldiers came aboard.

Erath noted their stern countenances as they inspected the troop ship, weapons in hand as they pored over the captain’s mandate and manifest. They scoured every deck, and the blade squire watched as a trio of robed blood mages studied every soldier onboard, softly chanting as they looked every man and woman in the eye.

“What are they looking for, mistress?” he asked Tifalenji.

“Signs of subterfuge,” replied the runesmith. “Deceptions. Wild magic.”

To Erath it all seemed strange. “But we are all Noxian soldiers, on an imperial ship. Does this not seem paranoid?”

“Patience, boy,” said Tifalenji. “When we dock at Fae’lor, you will understand.”

After they had been over every inch of the Atoniad, a contingent of the soldiery remained aboard while the others returned to their frigate, and the ship was cleared to advance to the next ring of the blockade. The inspections and checks repeated with each checkpoint, the guard detail rotating each time the Atoniad was stopped. Erath had been poked, prodded, and scrutinized so many times that when they finally had the harbor in sight, he questioned whether any of his own comrades trusted him, or anyone for that matter.

And then he got a better look at Fae’lor, and understood why.

The fortress had been gutted. He could make out only echoes of the great ramparts that had once stood at its heart, the formerly impregnable fortifications reduced to shattered remnants that rose from the ground like blackened, broken teeth. But the extent of the devastation went far beyond the walls and towers. The very land itself was broken open, torn apart and ripped out, bearing all the hallmarks of some incredible natural disaster.

The Atoniad drew up to her berth, and Noxians leapt to work both aboard and on the dock as soon as she came to a halt. Craftsmen rushed out to their assigned posts, while raw materials and supplies were offloaded and taken ashore. Erath went below decks, trying to put the shock of the island from his mind as he went about getting Talz and Henrietta off the Atoniad.

Standing out against the herds of livestock and more mundane pack animals, Erath led his beasts up a wide ramp leading from the ship’s hold. Waiting as those ahead of him were processed and allowed into Fae’lor, he stood transfixed as he watched crews descend over the wreckage of another warship like a swarm of furious ants.

Great winches and chains hauled the wreck up out of the water, a piece at a time. Teams scrambled down within, pulling out the pale, bloated shapes of the fallen in droves. She was more than twice the tonnage of the Atoniad, and her hull had been broken in two, like a stick over a man’s knee.

What kind of power could have possibly done such a thing?

Erath thought back to when he stood in the shadow of the Immortal Bastion. The certainty he felt there, seeing the empire marching to war, that there was nothing in creation that could possibly stand against them.

For the first time, seeing what had befallen Fae’lor with his own eyes, he felt doubt creep into his heart.

Finally he reached the end of the ramp, stepping from soaked wood onto cracked rock. The air was thick, humid, and dusty. It smelled of spice, things Erath couldn’t place as he realized, at long last, that he was there.

This was Ionia.

Erath lost track of how long he was standing there, or how the leather of Henrietta’s reins was sliding through his fingers. By the time he was aware of it, Marit’s mount was loping into the camp.

“Hey!” The blade squire started to pursue her, before looking back at Talz. “Stay,” he warned, drawing his knife and pinning the basilisk’s reins to the ground with it before sprinting after Henrietta.

“Whoa,” he called to the roving saurian as she stalked between a line of billet tents. She stopped, her long neck swiveling to regard Erath. Henrietta hissed at him through the gleaming metal of her chanfron, what Marit called “her jewelry.” Enclosing her face and skull, it was part protective helm, part weapon, accentuating her already vicious fangs with sharpened iron blades.

“Easy, my lady,” Erath coaxed, arms wide as he slowly closed the distance between them. “Easy, now.”

“Control that thing!” bellowed a voice from a group nearby. Both Henrietta and the blade squire shot them a hostile glare.

“She’s been cooped up on a ship for days,” Erath barked at the soldiers. He took advantage of Henrietta’s diverted attention and grabbed hold of her reins, wrapping the leather around his forearm. “She needs exercise, you want to be it? Then stay out of the way!”

Erath stared down the soldiers and watched them disperse, only registering after a time that the runesmith was calling for him. He went back to gather up Talz’s reins and guided his charges along, tugging the basilisk forward and holding Henrietta back as he headed toward where Tifalenji waited with Arrel and Marit. He saw new tension in the runesmith’s companions as he approached, a tightness in their postures that hadn’t been there before.

“Take your time,” Marit sneered, snatching Henrietta’s reins from Erath. Arrel squatted down, fingers brushing over the rubble strewn over the ground as her drakehounds orbited her.

“This was old magic,” muttered the tracker. “Something long-sleeping, now roused.”

“Where did you learn to sense magic?” Marit arced a skeptical eyebrow.

“Here,” Arrel answered, barely above a whisper.

“Oh joy,” replied Marit. She glanced at Tifalenji expectantly. “Well?”

“The last member of our expedition is here, at Fae’lor,” the runesmith replied. “We simply need to find her.”

“Just look for a dueling pit,” said Arrel. “She won’t be far from the scent of blood.”

Erath nodded, growing accustomed to gleaning what he could from inferences and cryptic words. “Does she have a beast that I am to care for as well?”

“Oh, manservant,” Marit shook her head. “Teneff? She is the beast.”

Arrel was right. While Fae’lor was in the midst of its reconstruction, it still remained a Noxian military camp. They followed the sound of ringing steel, sharper than the rhythm coming from the forges’ hammers, leading them to where the warriors on the island trained.

Past rows of billet tents were dug a series of shallow pits, each of them occupied by a pair of dueling soldiers. With blunted swords, wooden staves, or bare hands they sparred, but one in particular had attracted a crowd. The party had to muscle their way through the watching soldiers to catch a glimpse into the pit.

Two Noxians circled each other in full war-plate. One wielded a training sword and buckler, the other a heavy iron hook mounted on a length of chain. The soldiers watching cheered the pair as they measured distance and exchanged feints.

The swordsman sensed an opening. He lunged forward, flicking his buckler into his opponent’s face while slashing low with his sword. The other fighter leapt back, just shy of the blade, while throwing her hooked chain to ensnare the man’s shield arm. She whipped her arm down, wrenching the swordsman forward into a brutal headbutt. He dropped to the mire like a stone, blood spraying from a ruined nose.

“That’s first blood to me,” she crowed, and the onlookers erupted in cheers.

“That was dirty, Teneff,” the swordsman snarled, pawing blood from his mashed nose with a wicked laugh. “Let’s make it second blood. I’m not done with you yet.”

“First blood was the agreement,” Teneff repeated, with no compromise in her voice. “We need you in the line, Cestus.”

The swordsman barked out a swear and stood, trudging up out of the pit. Teneff wound her chain around her forearm, looking up to find Erath and the party staring down at her. Her eyes widened in confusion. “Marit? Arrel?”

Marit chuckled. “Still cracking skulls, eh, Ten?”

Teneff spat a gobbet of phlegm onto the ground. “Some of us never stopped,” she said with a grin, taking the hand Arrel offered her to pull her up out of the pit.

Erath backed out of her way as she climbed out. Teneff bore the hallmarks of a shield-breaker, a warrior of the line at home when her enemy was within arm’s reach. Scars crisscrossed any flesh not covered in leather and iron armor, tales of blood and honor etched into her over a lifetime of battle. He wondered how many of the scars she bore were earned here in Ionia.

“The last time I saw either of you,” said Teneff, “we were all—”

“Here,” said Marit. Quiet descended between the soldiers for a few moments. There was a bond between them, Erath could see that clearly. But there was a void there as well, something unspoken, or even missing. He had lived around soldiers long enough to know not to prod.

“Well,” said Teneff, breaking the silence. “If you’re all coming from Valoran, then you’ve been eating ship’s slop for days. Our cook’s no artist, but they’re a damn sight better than that. Come.”

The sun had begun to sink into the horizon, painting the sky in dappled bands of gold, orange, and scarlet, drifting down into indigo. They made their way through the mess tent and then found seats around a fire as the air started to chill. The women talked amongst themselves, of what they had done since last they served beside each other, and of the old wounds endured together. Erath remained silent, and listened.

“And you, boy,” said Teneff, her attention shifting to the blade squire. “You blooded? Fought your principal yet?”

Erath straightened. “I served my principal, yes.”

Her aspect became serious, analytical. “Where?”

“It was a border skirmish west of the Dalamor plains,” Erath answered. “A quick action, pretty light.” He looked to each of them, seeing that his answer had not been enough. This was not the ignorant voyeurism of the civilian, eager to satisfy some fanciful idea of what it was like to fight in a war they would never experience. These were veterans, warriors who may find themselves beside him in the line, needing to know what he had seen and how he had carried himself.

“It was a shallow expansion through a fertile valley,” he continued. “They were big boys, farming stock, but they were brought up to till the soil, not turn it red. Once we got within a rapid drumbeat, running charge, we closed, rolled up their right side double fast. Opened them up quite quickly.”

“Any of them left afterward,” asked Arrel, “to till that soil?”

Erath shook his head. “We tried. After their elders came around, we brought in others to help them take up the work. Harvest needed planting, no time to wait.”

Marit tilted her head. “And how many of those big farm boys did you make the soil red with, eh?”

“Leave it alone,” said Tifalenji.

“I was rearguard,” Erath shrugged. “By the time the lines rotated to me, they were already broken. We mostly just finished off those too wounded to save, and dug graves.”

The memory surfaced in Erath’s mind without asking. Trudging through the aftermath of a broken shield wall, feeling someone take hold of his ankle. Looking down, seeing a man who had taken a spear thrust to the belly, croaking at him in words he didn’t know, but a message he understood clear enough.

Putting his speartip to the man’s throat. The man tilting his head back to accept it.

“When was this?” asked Teneff.

“This past spring,” Erath answered.

“An infant!” exclaimed Marit.

“I said leave it alone,” the runesmith growled. “He’s here to tend beasts, nothing more.”

Marit chuckled, her eyes narrowed in amusement. Teneff eyed Tifalenji. “What of you then, rune-shaper? Where have you served?”

“Far from here,” she answered, and the odd light in her eyes convinced Erath that was as much as they would hear of her experiences.

Sleep was a glorious thing to a soldier. Any span of uninterrupted rest was precious, rivaling a full belly or a pair of well-made boots to a fighting man or woman. Erath had tried to adjust to the endless rolling and pitching of the Atoniad, but sleep had only come to him in fits and starts. Back on solid ground, with his cloak laid out on a flat, dry patch near the animal pens and his duties done, the blade squire rested his head against his pack and savored the prospect of sleeping through the next handful of hours before the early morning feedings came.

It felt as though he had no more than blinked before he heard the voice, sharp and cold as the edge of the knife he felt against his neck.

“Do as I say, in silence, or I will cut your throat.”

Erath opened his eyes. Dawn’s light was still hours away, the moon a thin silver sickle overhead as he was jerked to his feet. His knife had been taken. They walked, Erath careful to keep his movements slow and hands in view as he was led to the edge of the camp.

A huddle of figures stood ahead. He heard the low snarling of hounds as they approached, the silhouettes materializing into Arrel and Marit with the kneeling figure of the runesmith between them.

“What are you doing in Ionia, boy?” demanded the voice as Erath was shoved to his knees beside Tifalenji. He was alert enough to recognize the voice behind him as Teneff’s.

“I—”

“He knows nothing,” said Tifalenji calmly. Teneff lifted the knife from Erath’s throat and rounded upon the runesmith.

“And what do we know about you, eh?” Teneff looked to her fellow veterans. “Documents can be forged, mandates concocted.”

“My mandate is quite genuine,” said Tifalenji, her calm eerie to Erath, “as is the power you are flirting with opposing.”

Marit tilted her head. “Does the boy even know who you say you’re hunting? Who you would have us hunt?”

“He knows what has been necessary for him to know, and nothing more.”

“Then perhaps it’s time he knew,” Teneff looked down at Erath. “You seek a ghost. A warrior who died in honor as a hero to Noxus. Our comrade.” She gestured to Arrel and Marit. “Our sister!”

“She lives,” said the runesmith.

“Lies!” Teneff hissed. “Tell me why I should believe a word from your mouth and not kill you right here?”

“Because the powers to which I answer do not make those mistakes. If they say she lives, then she lives. You all served alongside her in service of the empire. Now the empire commands that we find her, and bring her back to them. My authority supersedes that of the garrisons here, they do not know of our task, nor shall they.”

“What proof do you have of any of this?” demanded Marit.

“Her blade,” Tifalenji sighed. The women stiffened.

“What of it?” hissed Teneff.

“Did you know she tried to destroy it?” asked the runesmith. She drew in a deep breath, and her eyes pulsed emerald. “She failed, and the magic that infused it cried out at the desecration. My masters heard it, and they saw who was responsible, as clearly as if they were standing in the room with her. That is how we know.”

“If she yet lives,” said Teneff, “then she is a deserter, the very crime you now ask us all to commit. The punishment for which is death.”

Tifalenji met Teneff’s withering gaze. “Succeed in this task, aid me in hunting her down and return her for judgment in Noxus, and no censure will befall you. Look into yourselves, all that you sacrificed in this place, and tell me that her treason does not wound you. Tell me you would turn your backs on seeing justice done, and the wayward answer for the life she has led these past years.”

A dark silence hung over the gathering. Tension radiated from Teneff, Marit, and Arrel, the threat of violence balanced on a knife’s edge. Erath fought his nerves, the simmering rage of secrets and the idea he may die here, on Fae’lor, with no inkling at all as to why.

“We will go with you.”

All eyes fell on Arrel, her first words since Erath had been brought to them. Marit rounded on the tracker. “You speak for all of us, now?”

“I do,” Arrel said flatly. She cleared her throat, the effort sounding almost pained to Erath. “Because we are soldiers, all of us. And a soldier does their duty. But more than that, she was a sister to us. And sisters deserve answers.”

Marit glared at Arrel, her dark eyes slits of intensity, but she relented. “Answers,” she repeated.

Teneff gritted her teeth, looking to the other veterans who gave her solemn nods. She hauled the runesmith to her feet by her collar, but did not release her. “At the first inkling that what you have told us here are lies, witch, I will take your head.”

“I speak only the truth,” answered Tifalenji. “And more now that we can tarry no longer than we already have. We must cross into the heart of the First Lands, and we must do so now.”

Tifalenji looked to Erath now for the first time. “What I have said to them bears the same truth to you, blade squire. Go with us along this path, attend and serve, and you will be rewarded.”

“I am a loyal warrior of Noxus,” Erath proclaimed. “I do my duty, and need not shadowy promises or the threat of a slit throat to do it. The empire bids I serve you, so I do. I only ask one question.”

Tifalenji regarded Erath soberly. “Ask it.”

“Who is it?” asked Erath. “Who are we hunting?”

The runesmith drew her sword. “She may call herself something different now, some adoptive name for her new life in the First Lands.”

The runes Erath had watched her etch along the blade leapt from the iron into the sky, like a trail leading off into the dark mystic land that loomed ahead of them.

“But in Noxus, her name was Riven.”

The council hall that had been as still as a grave swarmed back to life. Armed warrior priests, drawn by the commotion, flooded through the doors, pushing past villagers who just wanted to run away from the dangerous magic that had been thrust upon them.

The falcon-nosed judge had found her footing and cracked her wooden sphere against the table.

“This hall will restore itself to balance,” she demanded.

The room grew quiet once more. Overturned benches were righted. The crowd seated themselves. The hooded stranger scratched his scarred nose and moved to examine the new chest high scorch mark that blackened the walls of the council room. A warrior priest approached the magic weapon tentatively.

Amid the broken table legs, was the blade and sheath. A greenish glow of energy crackled around the still broken pieces. The warrior priest bent and reached for the pommel, using two hands as he felt the true weight of the sword. Though fractured, the weapon held its shape.

“Put that accursed thing away!” someone shouted from the crowd. The priest slid the weapon back into the sheath as more priests came to remove it.

“I killed him,” Riven repeated. The voice was hers and not hers. It was the past speaking through her. She looked at the faces in the room. Memory restored, she was awake once more to a shadowed corner of her history.

“Riven,” the judge said.

Riven’s attention snapped from the blade to the judge.

“Do you know what you are confessing to?” she asked.

Riven nodded.

“Why did you do this?”

“I do not remember.” The words were all she had to offer. Because of her bound hands, Riven could not wipe away the silent tears that ran down her jaw.

The judge stared hard, waiting for more to reveal itself, but when nothing came, she motioned to the bailiff.

“Riven, you will stay chained in this hall until dawn so that all who need to speak with you to make peace may do so before you are sentenced.”

Riven looked at the shackles on her wrist.

“The other magistrates and I will consult the scrolls and the elders for an appropriate punishment of your crime.”

The villagers left quietly. The last to leave was the old couple. Riven knew this because she heard Shava whisper in her country voice to the old man, though emotion made the words unclear. When she heard their aged feet finally shuffle over the threshold, Riven at last looked up. The room had been emptied of the living—the only thing she was left with were the ghosts of her past.

The midnight air was cold and clear. The full moon held a ring of frost high in the dark sky. The light streamed in through the hall’s still open doors, but did not reach the shadows which held Riven at the back of the room. None of the crowd had come inside during the day to make their peace. The warrior priests had taken the blade, but the wooden spiked scorch mark that encircled the room kept the villagers from venturing inside the council hall. Some had come to the open door, a few with more rotten eggfruit, but ultimately Riven had been left alone with her thoughts. Sleep had finally come for her, but it was the light, fitful sleep of someone who knew the coming dawn could be her last. When shuffling footsteps approached in the dark hours before sunrise, she was instantly awake.

Riven opened her eyes.

“O-fa,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

The old man crouched down next to her slowly and unrolled a soft cloth full of tools. Riven recognized the metal instruments as the ones he used to fix the long blade to the plow.

“What does it look like I’m doing, child?” The silhouette of the moonlight deepened the wrinkled edge of his face, but the gloom of the shadows where the two of them sat did not touch him the way Riven had thought they would.

“You are stubborn in your wish to die,” he chided her. “That is not how you will find balance.”

He worked the shackles at Riven’s wrist and ankles. Riven did not push him away and tell him to go home as her mind insisted. Her selfish heart would not let her. If the old man was the last person she would sit beside in this life, Riven wanted the moment to go on as long as it could. She sat this way for a few minutes until she heard footsteps on the gravel outside the hall. Riven looked to Asa. He was smiling, dangling the opened cuffs before her like a child’s toy.

“O-fa. Quickly. You must hide. Someone is coming.” The edge to Riven’s voice was sudden and sharp and left no room for argument. The old man shuffled to a dark corner to wait in the shadows. Riven bowed her head again in the practiced pose of sleep. She let her hair fall in front of her face, but kept her eyes open.

A strong wind blew through the trees and curled around the posts of the hall’s great doors. There, framed by a shaft of moonlight, the contour of a man stood on the threshold.

The stranger’s mantle was now pushed back fully from his face and hung loosely over his shoulders, leaving his blade and metal pauldron clearly outlined. He paused at the doorway like the others. Unlike the villagers, he ventured inside. His feet made no sound on the stone floor. When he was a blade’s length from Riven, he stopped.

He reached behind his back and retrieved a leather scabbard with harsh runic writing carved into it. He tossed it, clattering, at Riven's feet.

“Which weighs more, Riven?” he asked. “Your blade, or your past?”

It was clear the stranger knew Riven wasn’t sleeping and so Riven no longer pretended. She looked up at him, his face reduced to gray shadow, yet the scar across his nose was clear.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Another broken blade,” he answered. “You are ready to accept guilt. For that, I admire you.”

Riven watched as a brief wash of emotion crossed his face.

“There is more to the story of your blade,” he continued. “Do you desire the truth of what happened?”

“I killed him. He died because of me. They all died because of me,” Riven countered. She was not sure if she was capable of carrying more grief.

“Pick up your weapon.”

Riven sat. She could hear the man’s low growl of frustration.

“Stand and face your past,” the man said. His voice left no room for argument.

A wind began to build, swirling around the room, knocking back benches in the hall, and pushing Riven to her feet. Instinct and physical memory guided the young woman’s arm. When Riven faced the stranger, the sheathed blade was in her hand.

“I asked him to destroy it,” she said.

“Did you?” the man’s voice was mocking.

The stranger’s question was cutting and it hit a bone of memory in Riven. She shuddered with a half-remembered vision. Elder Souma’s voice had been so calm. The air in his meditation room had been heavy with thought and the smell of incense. Elder Souma had not judged her or her burden.

Riven looked at the stranger before her now, anguish building in her heart, flooding her body until it reached her hands. She tightened her fingers around the pommel as she drew the runic blade from its sheath.

“Why are you here?” Riven asked.

The broken blade coursed with power. The blinding light cast their shadows on the walls.

“I heard you wanted to die.” The stranger smiled.

The ghosts that haunted her had returned in full force and Riven swung wildly at them now. The man’s blade parried the sadness and the fury. It infuriated her and centered her back in the present. They danced around each other. The air hummed and crackled at each block and thrust.

“I came here to kill my master’s murderer.” He was breathing hard through gritted teeth. “I came here to kill you.”

Riven laughed, tears in her eyes. “Then do it.”

The wind warrior lowered his sword, and instead manipulated the very air that swirled around them. The magic built to a fever pitch, the man focused the energy at the runic blade. The Noxian spells within the weapon shuddered, the broken pieces separating for a moment, releasing the sliver at the fore end.

The energy collapsed and the sliver broke away, speeding toward the shadowed corner that held Asa. The tiny bit of death was about bury itself in the old man’s throat. The spiced memory of incense flooded Riven’s nose, she was back in Elder Souma’s meditation room.

“No!” she shouted. Riven dropped her blade, unable to prevent that which had happened before.

Just as the piece of shrapnel was about to graze the old man’s weathered skin, it stopped, held in place by a current of air. The man with the scarred nose let out a strained sigh and the small shard of Riven’s broken blade dropped harmlessly to the stone floor.

“You are lucky your breath comes so heavily, Master Konte,” the stranger said, his own short-winded words tumbled out quickly.

Riven ran to the old man and embraced him. She looked over her shoulder at the stranger. A breeze still whipped his hair as he wiped a bit of sweat away with the back of his free hand.

“It is true.” The stranger joined them, picking up the splinter of the blade. Riven watched some of his anger melt into understanding. “You killed Elder Souma, but you did not murder him.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The moment Riven had been searching for, she was living again. The words came fast and thick. She was shaking as she held on to the old man.

“I came to him. I begged...” Riven struggled to enunciate each word as emotion overcame her. “I begged him to help me. To break this. To break me.”

“Elder Souma tried to destroy your blade,” the scarred man said. His voice grew thick. “But we cannot destroy our past, Riven.”

Riven knew what it was to face memories that could not live again, but would not stay dead. She saw now this stranger carried his own ghosts. The swirling eddies of air calmed around him as he gave a heavy sigh.

“Elder Souma was my responsibility. If I had been there… that night… I could have protected him. It was not your intention to kill him.” Riven watched, one knowing fighter to another, as the man resettled the burden of his own unseen demons once again on his shoulders. He met her gaze. “In the end, the fault of his death lies with me.”

“Yasuo?” The old man looked more closely at the man and then wagged a gnarled finger at this. “You have shown great honor in admitting the truth in this matter.”

“My honor left a long time ago, O-fa,” In Yasuo, Riven saw her own resistance at the offer of hope, of forgiveness. The man with the wild hair shook his head at the old man’s reprieve. “One mistake has compounded many others since. That is my punishment.”

The pronouncement was interrupted by the shift of gravel. A falcon-nosed woman entered the council chamber. She walked carefully around the room, inspecting the damage of the fight between the two broken warriors. A metal jangle kept time with her footfalls. The judge slowed as she passed Riven and the old man. Riven recognized a loop of leather slung with the keys to her shackles. When the magistrate came face to face with the stranger, she stopped.

“Taking responsibility is the first step to atonement, Yasuo” she said evenly.

“And the second?” There was a desperate edge to Yasuo’s words.

Yasuo held the magistrate’s gaze. The room stilled, holding its breath.

The judge’s quiet voice was loud in the empty council hall. “Forgiving yourself.”

Riven watched the fellow warrior closely. He could not bring himself to the words that would release him from his pain. Riven had wanted death for so long, but now as she witnessed Yasuo’s own struggle, she knew the hardest thing she could do was to live and to live with what she had done. Yasuo looked at her now. Would he stay and face his past?

The man who carried the weight of the wind turned his back on the council hall and walked into the night. Riven held tightly to the weathered hands of the old man.

Sunrise was cool, but there was a thickness in the blanket of clouds that hinted the day would turn warm and humid. When the warrior priest and the hawk faced judge with the leather loop of keys had come to collect Riven, the judge had raised one slender eyebrow at the neatly piled shackles still on the floor. Riven stood on her own and walked out of the hall to face her future.

The other magistrates had gathered the waiting villagers in the square outside the council hall. Riven assumed none of them wished to be confined with her or her runic blade. A cool breeze now tugged at the plaits of the judge’s hair.

“Upon examining the evidence and consulting with the elders, the Noxian woman will stand for her crimes,” the judge began.

Riven bristled at the inclusion of the land of her birth. She watched as Shava and Asa leaned on each other.

“Though easy to carry out, a sentence of death does not keep the world in balance,” the head magistrate continued. “It does little to repair the destruction a crime rips through a community.”

The people of the village nodded in sober agreement. Riven took in their faces, noticing a pattern to the many who were missing; fathers and mothers to the young, sons and daughters of the old.

“Instead, this council seeks a longer, harsher sentence,” the judge continued. “We will see that Riven, the exile, mends that which she has broken.”

The judge looked down her falcon nose at Riven.

“It will be a punishment of hard labor,” the judge announced. “Starting with the fields of Master and Mistress Konte.”

A murmur swept through the crowd.

“This court will also see Riven make reparations to the council hall. And to those whose homes and families were injured in the Noxian invasion.”

The judge looked at Riven expectantly. “Will you live by this decision?”

All eyes were on Riven now. A new emotion caught in her throat. She looked around. The ghosts she carried did not melt away with the pronouncement. Riven looked to them as they mixed freely with the living. It surprised her. She welcomed the visions. She would prove to them that she was worthy of the gift being offered.

“Yes.” Riven barely recognized her own voice, overcome as it was.

The old couple swept forward at this, crushing Riven between them. Riven relaxed into their embrace, leaning into them now as they did to her.

“Dyeda,” Shava murmured against the slashes of Riven’s white hair.

“Daughter,” she whispered back.

“How came you to Ionia, friend?”

Muramaat tried to keep her voice light. She had never felt uncomfortable sharing a campfire with other travelers along the road to the markets before. This, however, marked her first time sitting across the flames from a Noxian, one with an enormous weapon sheathed across her back.

How many Ionian lives has that blade claimed? she wondered.

The white-haired woman glanced at her “father” before swallowing a mouthful of charred peppers and rice, then cast her eyes down at her plate. “I was born in Noxus,” she said, her accent thick but her tonality nearly flawless. “I have not been back since the war, and I do not plan to return.”

The Noxian’s father, Asa Konte, smiled and placed his hand on her shoulder. “This is her home now,” he said with finality.

Muramaat had invited Asa to make camp with her before she had spotted the Noxian asleep in the back of his cart. He had introduced her as his daughter, Riven, in this same tone, with his chin jutting forward in preemptive defense. Muramaat hadn’t pushed back against the strange old man’s declaration then, but that didn’t mean his “daughter” was beyond scrutiny.

“You have not answered my question,” Muramaat pressed, the chimes of her mender’s necklace clinking together as she poured herself a cup of tea. “What brought you to our shores, Riven?”

Riven tightly gripped her plate, tension rippling through her shoulders. “I fought in the war.”

A simple statement, laden with sorrow. Curious, to hear regret from a Noxian.

“Why did you stay?” Muramaat asked. “Why would anyone stay in a place where they and their people have caused so much pain, so much destruction?”

Crack.

The plate had broken in half in Riven’s white-knuckled grip, her charred peppers and rice falling to the ground. With a gasp, she dropped the plate shards before bowing ruefully. “My deepest apologies,” she mumbled as she rose. “I will pay for this plate, and then we will leave you to your evening. I didn’t mean to intrude—”

But Muramaat wasn’t listening. Instead, she cradled the broken plate in her hands and held the shards to her ear, humming softly. Slowly, she adjusted her pitch, calling to the spirit within the clay.

The back of her skull tingled when she hit the right tone, as the spirit reverberated with her hum. Holding the note, Muramaat lifted her necklace and flicked its chimes until she found the one that joined her and the spirit in song.

She stared at the chime in the firelight—each one had been inscribed with a symbol that identified how to mend a resonant spirit. This symbol was for smoke, a single line with a curve that became more pronounced toward the end. Muramaat lifted the shards above the fire to bathe them in the smoke. It took only moments before they knitted back together, with only a few coal-colored seams and ridges to show that the plate had ever been broken.

“I’m a mender,” she said as she held the pottery out to a wide-eyed Riven. “No need to replace anything.”

Riven took the plate and examined it. “How does it work?” she asked, running a finger down a thick black seam.

“Everything has a spirit, and every spirit wants to be whole. I ask them what they need to mend, and give it to them.”

“It leaves scars,” Riven sighed.

“Scars are a sign of healing. That plate will never be seamless again, but it is whole. And it is strong. I’d even say it is more beautiful like this.”

Riven considered the plate in silence.

“I am still here,” she said after a moment, “because I have caused so much pain and so much destruction. I stay to atone.”

Muramaat nodded somberly. Clearly Riven’s scars, though invisible, ran deep. Perhaps this Noxian was different from the others.

But then Muramaat’s eyes fell to the hilt of Riven’s massive weapon. A tool for cutting, not mending.

How different can she really be?

Muramaat woke bleary-eyed to a loud thump against the side of her caravan. Bandits. Riven had insisted on keeping watch through the night, Muramaat remembered as she grabbed her heaviest kettle. But the mender was experienced in dealing with robbers and could always hold her own in a fight.

When she opened her door, however, she saw that Riven would not need her help after all.

One of the intruders lay crumpled at the foot of the caravan. By the fire stood Riven, surrounded by three hulking bandits. She held the enormous hilt, and Muramaat was surprised to see only a broken blade attached to the end. Yet the weapon was still formidable. It seemed to pulse in Riven’s hands as she waited for the others to advance.

Muramaat’s stomach turned to see that blade, not relishing the sight of a Noxian spilling more Ionian blood... but still she watched.

The bandits rushed at Riven, yelling incoherently, but she took a single step forward and repulsed them with a burst of energy from her blade. They dropped their weapons, then scrambled to find them in the dark. Riven could have cut them all down, Muramaat realized, but she didn’t. Instead, she raised her sword, which began to glow an eerie green. The magic from the weapon blasted outward and repelled one of the bandits as soon as it touched him. He fell to the ground in a catatonic daze.

By this point, the others were on their feet, weapons in hand. Riven brought her arm back, and glowing pieces of metal raced toward the Noxian from the cart. The shards formed around the blade, making it look almost whole—though there were still gaps between the pieces. The bandits rushed her again.

Or so they tried. Riven whipped the blade in front of her and blew them back against the caravan with a sudden gust of wind, knocking them all unconscious.

A bloodless victory.

Muramaat stepped gingerly over the defeated bandits. “What will you do with them?” she asked Riven, who had barely broken a sweat.

Riven shrugged, letting the shards of her sword drop to the ground. “I’ll just tie them to a tree until morning.”

Muramaat stared at the remnant of the blade. It didn’t seem as threatening anymore, now that she had seen how Riven wielded it. “Could I see your weapon?”

Riven frowned and took a step back. “Why?”

“You don’t need to hand it to me. Just hold it up.”

Warily, Riven raised the blade. Muramaat closed her eyes and hummed.

“What are you doing?” Riven asked in alarm, just as Muramaat found the right pitch—

—a pair of eyes, searching—

—three hunters, hearts filled with hate, thoughts with revenge—

—burning—

—everything, burning—

Muramaat didn’t realize she had fallen until she felt Riven shake her. “Are you all right?”

“Someone,” Muramaat whispered, her throat dry, “is searching for this blade. For you.”

Riven blanched, but her eyes revealed nothing of her thoughts. “What did you do, Muramaat?” she asked in a low whisper.

“I was wrong to question you. I wanted to offer my apologies by mending your sword.”

“No.” The intensity of the word took Muramaat by surprise. “If you truly want to thank me, you will never fix this blade.” Riven chuckled, a bitter sound. “The one thing I would want you to fix, you can’t. But... thank you. For the offer.”

She sighed, exhausted, and collected up the shards of her sword.

“You should go back to sleep if you want to get to the marketplace early tomorrow.”

Muramaat nodded and slowly made her way to her caravan. When she looked back, Riven was at the fire, sitting and watching the night.

Not for the first time, Muramaat wished she knew how to mend people.

A loud crack. The stench of grease, smoke, and powder.

These sounds and smells did not belong to the forest.

The huntress bounded towards the sound, spear at the ready. She followed the acrid scent through the maze of trunks and thick underbrush.

Before long, she came upon a familiar place—a small clearing by an embankment. This was a quiet place teeming with life, split by a shallow stream of fast-running water. The fish were so plentiful, even a cub could catch them with clumsy paws. The calm air was rent by the howls of something, or someone, in great pain.

Nidalee chose a spot behind a thick tree at the stream’s edge, careful to conceal her spear behind its trunk. Just across the river knelt a vastayan male with reptilian features. He clutched at his shoulder, and though he moaned in pain, his eyes were wild with rage. The huntress saw his long tail was caught in a trap. Huge metal teeth had bitten into his scaly flesh.

A human holding a long, ugly weapon loomed over the vastaya. Nidalee stared at the dead, shining wood wrapped around the metal barrel. She had seen these things before. They fired lethal seeds that could easily pierce a target, and these seeds traveled too fast for her eyes to follow.

She stepped out from behind the tree, purposefully crunching dead leaves underfoot. The man turned his head in her direction, but kept his weapon aimed at the wounded vastaya. He could not see her spear.

“My, my. What have we here?” The human looked her up and down, his eyes hungry. “Are you lost, love?”

The huntress knew how to handle his kind. Humans were so often disarmed by her appearance—their eyes saw only the softness of her features. She remained expressionless, carefully gauging the distance between them and adjusting her grip on the spear. Her eyes rested on the weapon in his hands.

He smirked at the wild woman, taking her stillness for fear. “Never seen one of these before? Come have a look. I won’t hurt you,” the man coaxed. He turned away from his prey to hold out his weapon.

As soon as it was pointed away from the vastaya, Nidalee whirled out from behind the tree. She hurled her spear at the human’s torso and dove across the river, enveloping herself in a fierce, feral magic. In a flash, her features shifted—nails hardened into harsh points, skin sprouted flaxen fur, and bones bent into a slender shape.

The man dodged too slowly. The spear cut through the flesh of his upper arm and knocked him onto his back. Nidalee landed on top of him in the lithe form of a cougar, each sharp claw piercing through his thin clothing. She pressed her front paw down on his fresh wound, earning a howl of pain.

The cougar crouched over the man, opening her jaws wide and bringing her sharp teeth against his throat. The human shrieked as Nidalee bit slowly into his neck, just deep enough to draw blood, but not to kill. After a few moments, she released the man’s throat and brought her face into his view, baring her bloodied teeth at him.

Another gust of magic swirled around her, and again she took the form of a woman, her sharp teeth somehow no less menacing. Still crouched over him, she looked down at him through bright, emerald eyes.

“You will leave, or you will die. Understand?”

The huntress did not wait for an answer. She tore a piece of fabric from the man’s shirt, and approached the wounded vastaya. Within seconds, she disarmed the trap around his tail. The moment he was freed, he lunged for the human.

Nidalee grabbed the vastaya’s arm, holding him back. The man, who had been frozen in fear, saw his chance to flee, and hurriedly crawled from sight.

The reptilian wrested his arm from Nidalee’s grip, sputtering and cursing in a language she did not recognize. Then, in a familiar tongue, he demanded, “Why did you let it go?”

Nidalee pointed to where the human had fled, indicating spots of bright red blood. “We will follow him. If there are others, he will lead us to them. If they do not leave, they will die together.”

The vastaya did not look satisfied, but said nothing. Nidalee knelt by the river and washed the cloth she had torn from the man.

“You called it… human.” He spoke with a strange lisp. His mouth was very wide, and his forked tongue flicked out between words.

Nidalee wrapped the damp, clean fabric around his shoulder. “Yes.”

“You are not human?”

“No. I am like you.”

“There is no vastaya like you. You are human.”

Nidalee pulled the fabric tightly around his shoulder, causing him to hiss in pain. She managed to conceal her smile by using her teeth to secure the knot.

“I am called Nidalee. You?”

“Kuulcan.”

“Kuulcan. Tonight, my family hunts. You will join us.”

The vastaya stretched his arm, testing the bandage. It was tight, but did not hinder his movement. He looked up at the huntress, who stood above him with her arms crossed.

Kuulcan nodded.

Percy sat by the fire, his face flushed a deep red—partly because of the adrenaline, partly because of the beer, but mostly because of the embarrassment. He had told his three companions of the wild woman, and they hadn’t stopped laughing. One of them took it upon himself to prance about the fire with his guitar and sing a lewd prayer to the “Queen of the Jungle” while the other two guffawed and danced.

“Keep it down, you damned idiots,” he pleaded, earning an even louder roar of laughter. “She might hear us.”

Tired of the taunting and full of far too much ale, Percy snuck away from his fellow trappers to answer the call of nature. The wound still hurt something fierce, and no amount of drinking could chase away the feeling of her teeth on his throat.

As he refastened his belt, he realized the singing and laughing had stopped. The wind itself had stopped blowing. He could hear no rustling leaves or swaying branches.

Beyond the dim light of their low fire, their camp was surrounded by total darkness. Far ahead past the edge of the camp, something glinted in the shadows. Percy rubbed his eyes and squinted, struggling to see anything in the dark.

All at once, the undergrowth began to heave and creak. The leaves of every fern and tree shook with movement. Countless pairs of eyes opened before him in the darkness, and a chorus of growls and feline hisses deafened him.

Percy recognized the emerald eyes nearest to him. There was no trace of humanity left in them now. The eyes blinked and disappeared, and a voice snarled in his ear.

“You were warned.”

He did not manage to scream before the sharp teeth closed around his throat—and this time they did not stop when they drew blood.

The overcast skies had parted since the magistrates entered. When the large doors at the back of the hall opened again, Riven watched as the room full of villagers was split by a blinding shard of daylight. She walked across the hall’s threshold and the movement pushed aside the still air in the hall like the release of a held breath.

The doors closed behind her. Two warrior priests marched her through the large aisle that divided the throng. The council hall was once again cast in the murky gloom from curled windows set high in the ceiling and the cylindrical lanterns that hung from the sculpted roof. She watched Shava Konte swallow thickly as she passed.

She knew what they saw. A woman, her white hair matted with straw from a rough sleep in stone cell. A stranger. An enemy. A daughter of Noxus.

Fatigue clung to Riven’s bones like the farmer’s mud that still stained her clothes. Her soul felt stiff and misshapen, but when Riven’s gaze found the old man on the stool, she stood a little straighter.

She took in the three judges seated on the dais before her. The stern one in the middle motioned for Riven to be seated, rather than shackled standing.

Riven refused the wooden chair shaped by magic. She recognized the bailiff as the lead rider that came to old couple’s field. His thin lips stretched in the same arrogant smile.

“Suit yourself, it’ll just be harder for you.”

The bailiff sat on the chair himself with an air of satisfaction. The center judge gave the bailiff a look of admonishment and then spoke to Riven.

“I know you are not of this land. The dialect here is tricky. I will speak the common tongue so that we may better understand each other.”

Like most Noxians, Riven had learned enough of Ionia’s common tongue to command and order, but like the land itself, the accent of each village had a unique personality flavored by its people. She nodded at the judge and waited.

“What is your name?”

“Riven,” Riven said. Her voice was hoarse, catching in her throat with a croak.

“Bring her water.”

The bailiff stood and took up a skin of water, shoving it at her. Riven looked at the skin, but did not take it.

“It is only water, child,” the judge seated beside the center judge said, leaning forward over the table. “What, do you fear we would poison you?”

Riven shook her head, refusing the offer. She cleared her throat, determined to speak without any more assistance. The bailiff pursed his lips and took a deep swig, water dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He flashed his teeth in a triumphant sneer meant for her.

“You have been brought before this council,” the judge interrupted, drawing Riven’s attention back to the three robed figures and the crowd gathered within the hall. “Because we wish to know what you have to say.”

“Am I not being sentenced?”

The judge swallowed her surprise.

“I am unclear about how justice is carried out where you come from, but here we believe justice is first served by understanding and enlightenment.” The judge spoke to Riven as if she was a young child. “We believe you have knowledge of an event that is most important to this community. If that knowledge reveals a crime, then you could be sentenced and punished accordingly.”

Riven looked from the judge to Asa, then back. Justice in Noxus was often decided in combat. If one was lucky, it was decided swiftly and with the sharpened end of the weapon. Riven eyed the judge warily. “What do you want to know?”

The judge leaned back. “Where are you from, Riven?”

“I have no homeland.”

The judge’s narrowing gaze told Riven that her words had been taken as defiance. The hawk-faced magistrate paused, tempering her response. “You must have been born somewhere.”

“A farm in Trevale.” Riven looked at the old man. “Noxus,” she admitted.

The council hall, which had dropped back to silence in order to hear the prisoner, took in a collective breath.

“I see,” continued the judge. “And you no longer call that place home.”

“When your home tries to kill you, is it still home?”

“You are an exile then?”

“That would imply I wish to return,” Riven said.

“You do not?”

“Noxus is no longer what it once was.” Impatience edged into Riven’s voice. “Can we get on with this?”

“So be it,” the judge said with a calmness that irritated Riven more than the shackles on her wrists. “You came with the Noxian fleet, yes?”

“I assume so.”

“You do not know?” The judge looked confused.

“I do not remember,” Riven said. She glanced to the crowd, her sideways look catching the eyes of Shava. The old woman had asked a similar question. Riven shook her head. “Does it matter? There was a battle. Many died. That is all I know.”

The painful memory of war that smoldered among the crowd flared to life at Riven’s words. They shoved each other, shoulders knocking together and shouting, as they all tried to stand at once.

Someone lashed out. “Noxian filth! My son is dead because of you!”

A moldy eggfruit sailed through the air and pelted Riven in the neck. The fermented juice and pulp slid wetly down the back of her shirt. The rotten smell rose up in the air, but Riven would not allow the scent of death to take her back to that moment long ago. She closed her eyes, allowing her breath to come through parted lips.

With that, the crowd erupted. Riven knew what it looked like, that she felt nothing for what had happened to these people. “Please,” she whispered to herself, unsure if she was imploring them to stop, or to encourage the fullness of their barely contained anger.

In answer, more of the late season eggfruit exploded on the stone floor. One caught Riven behind the knee. She stumbled, struggling to maintain her balance with her hands bound.

The judge rose to her full height, towering over the seated villagers and Riven. Her magistrate’s robe flared as she slammed the chestnut sphere against its cradle. The wooden benches beneath the crowd strained, groaning and flexing in response to the magistrate’s will.

“I will have balance restored to this hall!”

The reprimanded villagers quieted.

“Yes, Riven, the council remembers that time,” the judge continued with more restraint. “Many Ionians… and Noxians… perished. And you?”

It was a question that plagued Riven. Why had she been spared when others had not? She could offer no answer that would satisfy. “It seems I did not,” she said quietly

“Indeed.” The judge smiled coldly.

Riven knew there was little she could say to pacify the bereaved crowd. She owed them the truth, but even that was not hers to give. Her memories of that time were broken. She bowed her head.

“I do not remember,” Riven said.

The judge did not stop the questioning. Riven knew doing so would only allow for interruptions to spew forward from the anger simmering in the room.

“How long have you been in this land?”

“I do not remember.”

“How did you come to this village?”

“I do not remember.”

“Have you been here before?”

“I…” Riven hesitated, but could not hold on to the moment that would give a clear answer. “I cannot remember.”

“Did you meet with Elder Souma?”

The name stirred something within her. A memory of a memory, hazy and sharp at the same time passed through her. Anger flooded the empty place where her past once lived. She had been betrayed. She had betrayed.

“I can’t remember!” Riven lashed out in frustration, the shackles at her wrists rattling.

“War breaks many things,” the judge said, softening. “Some we cannot see.”

In the face of this enlightenment, some of the fight left Riven. “I cannot remember,” she said, more calmly than before.

The judge nodded. “There are others who may be able to speak to what you cannot remember.”

Riven watched the old man make his way slowly to a witness stool set in front of the judges. His fingers shook as he smoothed a few errant hairs in his thick eyebrows.

“Asa Konte,” the judged said patiently. “O-fa, thank you for sharing your knowledge with us today.”

The old man nodded.

“Do you know this woman, the one called Riven?” the judge asked.

“Yes,” the old man said. “She came to us at the beginning of this past wet season.”

“Us?”

“Myself and Shava, my wife.”

The judge looked up at Mistress Konte, who still shifted uncomfortably on the bench at the front of the hall. The judge gestured to Riven.

“She came to you?”

“Well, I found her in our field,” the old man offered sheepishly. “We had a calf wander in the night. At dawn I went looking for it. Instead I found her.”

Murmurs of surprise and concern spilled again from the crowd.

“Spy!”

“More will come!”

“We must protect ourselves!”

The judge rested a hand on the heavy wooden sphere in front of her. The room grew quiet. “What did she want, Master Konte?”

The old man smoothed his eyebrows again and glanced at Riven. His look begged apology.

“She wanted to die, magistrate,” he said softly.

The judge leaned forward.

“It was the start of the wet season,” Asa continued. “She was soaked to the skin, nothing but fevered bones held together by mud and stubborn Noxian muscle.”

“You knew she was Noxian?”

“She carried a weapon, a blade, the scabbard was inscribed with the marks of their father tongue. No Ionian would carry such a weapon.”

The judge pursed her lips. “Master Konte, you took heavy losses during the invasion?”

“I did, magistrate,” the old man said. He looked to his wife. “Two sons.”

“What did you do with the woman?”

The old man took a deep breath.

“I took her home to Shava,” he said.

The murmur of the hall rose again, questioning the man’s lenience on a foe that had been so merciless. The faces within the hall told their stories of loss. None in their community had been untouched by the conflict. The old man lifted his head, and turned to the crowd, challenging the hardness of their hearts.

“My sons… My boys… Their bones have long since been cleaned by the sky. Would those we lost wish us to bury ourselves in grief beside them?”

Riven watched as the old man and his wife shared a knowing look. Shava’s eyes were wet and full.

“We were not ready to let them go, but…” The old man’s voice quivered. “But it does us no good to mire ourselves in the past when there is life left to live.”

Shava bit her bottom lip and sat up straighter, daring those who sat next to her to speak ill of their choice. Asa turned away from the crowd’s stares. He sat facing the magistrate, the stool creaking beneath him.

“There were so many deaths, I couldn’t bear to add another,” he explained. “We cleaned her up and offered what we had in peace.”

The judge nodded without emotion. Riven watched as the judge took in Riven’s shirt and pants, mentally unrolling the cuffs. She knew what the judge pictured as she had thought the same thing many times since the old woman had presented the clothes. They were meant for a young man, a head taller than her, maybe a man with Shava’s smile or Asa’s kind eyes.

For Riven it was a constant reminder of her own weakness. All her years of living or dying by the strength of Noxus, and Riven had accepted their fragile offer of hope, let herself be clothed in it and in a family that could have been.

“When she regained her strength, she wanted to work in the fields,” the old man went on. “My wife and I are old. We welcomed the help.”

“You and your wife did not fear for your lives?”

“The girl wants nothing to do with Noxus. She hates Noxus.”

“She said this to you?”

“No,” he said. “She said nothing of her past. Shava asked her once and she said nothing. We saw that it pained her, so we did not ask again.”

“If she said nothing, then how do you infer her feelings about her homeland?”

Master Konte wiped at his old eyes. Riven watched the trouble pass over his face, like the words were not his to give. He spoke quickly, conscious suddenly of the audience surrounding him.

“Fevered dreams, magistrate,” he said. “The night she came to us. Something that belonged to her, something she had cared for greatly, had been broken. For that she cried out against Noxus.”

“Do you know the thing she spoke of?”

“I believe so, magistrate.” The old man nodded slowly. “The pommel of her weapon has been bound into her scabbard. Four days ago I saw her undo the laces. I saw the blade was broken.”

Riven had thought she had only been watched by the fat mousing cat that day in the barn.
A few snide comments about the quality of Noxian weapons passed like handshakes among the crowd.

“And what did you do with that knowledge, Master Konte?”

“I took the blade to the temple.”

The judge cocked her head to one side, looking down her predatory nose at the old man. “To what end?”

“I hoped the priests might be able to mend it. That if the blade was made whole, she might be relieved of some of the ghosts that haunt her.” Even as crowd erupted behind him, the old man looked at Riven and the chains that bound her hands. “That she might have some peace in the present.”

“Thank you, Master Konte, for sharing your knowledge with the council,” the judge said, coldly staring the congregation into silence. “Your attestation is finished.”

She looked down at an unrolled parchment and back to the bailiff.

“Bring in the weapon.”

Riven watched two temple priests carry in a large wooden tray draped with a scarlet cloth and set it gingerly on the table before the council judges. A warrior priest stepped forward, his high rank made evident by the fluted edges of his wooden pauldron and breastplate.

“Show us,” the judge said.

The warrior priest withdrew the scarlet cloth, revealing a weapon and sheath both bigger than a kite shield. The scabbard was etched in the harsh strokes of Ur-Noxian, the heavy angles and slashes in stark contrast to the fluid script of Ionia. But it was the blade that drew the interest of the judges. A blade so thick and heavy it looked like it would break the well-trained arm of a temple priest to lift it, let alone the slender wrist of the young woman shackled before them. Indeed, when Riven had seen the weapon for the first time, she had thought the same thing.

Now, instead of one solid blade, the weapon was fractured into angry pieces, as if monstrous claws had raked through its metal flesh. The five largest pieces would have been deadly in their own right, but laid out against the soft Ionian cloth, broken and raw as it was, it was terrifying.

The judge looked at Riven. “This weapon belongs to you.”

Riven nodded her head.

“I suppose in this many pieces, it makes it a bit difficult to wield,” the judge said to herself.

There were snickers among the crowd.

The warrior priest shifted uncomfortably. “This weapon is ensorcelled, magistrate. The Noxians have bound magic into the blade.” The disgust hung heavy on his words.

Riven didn’t know if the judge was listening to the priest. The judge was nodding absently, her gaze washing over the weapon until it found the spot that Riven knew it would, the empty place Riven had struggled to fill. The judge’s falcon nose twitched.

“There is a piece missing.”

A young temple adept swayed nervously before the council hall.

“Adept, is this the weapon Master Konte presented to the temple?” the lead judge asked.

“Yes, magistrate.”

“You were the one to alert this court?”

“Yes, magistrate.”

“How did you know this weapon would be of interest to us?”

Riven watched the adept wipe his hands on the lengthy sleeves of his robes. His face was pale, as if he might faint, or be sick on the stone floor.

“Adept?” the judge probed.

“I am a bone washer, magistrate.” The words tumbled out of the young man. His hands hung like spent candle wax. “For the elders. After their bodies have been left to the sky, I collect them and prepare them.”

“I am familiar with the duties of a bone washer, adept. How is it this weapon concerns you?”

“The blade is the same.”

A moment of confusion swept over the judge’s face. The same uncertain daze washed over the crowd, passing from person to person in befuddled looks. Riven, however, felt a wave of unease crawl over her skin.

“When I prepared the bones of Elder Souma, after his time, for the temple, I mean to say.” The adept’s haphazard explanation was losing many. Instead of continuing he pulled from a fold in his robe a small silk bag and started undoing the tight knots with his long fingers. He retrieved from the bag a shard of metal and held it up. “This metal, magistrate. It is the same as the broken blade.”

The adept scurried from his place and approached the judge. She took the shard from his outstretched hand and turned it over in her fingers. Even held at a distance, the metal seemed similar to the broken blade.

Riven's breath caught in her throat. There was the piece of her past that she had searched for and given up finding. Now it was on the verge of coming together, illuminating a dark and forgotten corner of her mind. The guilt Riven carried and had buried deep was finally being unearthed. Riven steeled herself against what she knew would come next.

“Where did you find this?” the judge asked.

The adept cleared his throat. “In the bones of Elder Souma’s neck.”

The council hall gasped.

“You did not bring this forward before?” The judge’s eyes narrowed as she focused in on her target.

“I did,” the adept said, trying desperately to look anywhere but the warrior priest who stood next to Riven’s broken blade. “But my master said it was nothing.”

The judge had no such trouble looking at the warrior priest.

“Approach,” she ordered. She handed the bit of mangled metal to the warrior priest. “Put it with the rest.”

The warrior priest glared at the adept, but followed the orders given. He approached Riven’s blade and then turned at the last minute to the judge. “Magistrate, there is dark magic in this weapon. We don’t know what this piece may reveal.”

“Proceed.” The judge’s words left no room for argument.

The warrior priest turned back. All the eyes in the council hall watched as he took the sliver of hammered metal and placed it nearest the tip of the broken blade.

The weapon was silent.

The judge let out a small sigh. Riven, however, continued to watch the old man and his wife. She knew their hope would last only a moment longer. She had been weak to accept it, to believe that there was something in this world for someone so broken. Their relief at her fleeting innocence hurt most of all. It hurt because Riven knew in that moment the good they believed about her was a lie. The truth of her past was sharper and more painful than any blade.

Riven heard the sword beginning to hum. “Please,” she called out. She struggled to be heard over the chatter of the hall. She struggled against her restraints. “Please, you must listen.”

The vibration built. Now it could be heard and felt. The villagers panicked, pushing and shoving to get back. The judge stood quickly, her arms outstretched to the wooden table that held the broken sword. The edge of the table began to grow and curl, the wood budding new green limbs over the weapon, but Riven knew the magic would not hold.

“Everyone, get down!” Riven yelled, but the sound of the blade drowned out her voice, indeed all the voices, as the weapon built to a fever pitch.

Then, all at once the power exploded in a burst of runic energy and splintered wood. A gust of wind knocked everyone who had been standing down to the floor.

From the ground, the faces of the crowd turned to Riven.

Riven’s lips were cold and her cheeks flushed. The ghosts of her mind, memories she had entombed, they were fully alive now, looming one by one before her. They were Ionian farmers, sons and daughters, the people of this village that would not kneel to Noxus. They were looking at her. Haunting her. They knew her guilt. They were her warriors, too, her brothers- and sisters-in-arms. They would have gladly sacrificed themselves for the glory of the empire, instead she had failed them. She had led them under the banner of Noxus, a banner that had promised them a home and purpose. In the end, they were betrayed and discarded. All of them cut down by the sick poison of war.

Now these ghosts stood among the living, the courtroom of spectators knocked down by the power of the blade. The villagers slowly rose to their feet, though Riven was still there in that valley from long ago. She couldn’t breathe. Death choked her nose and throat.
No, these dead aren’t real, she told herself. She looked at Asa and Shava and they at her. Two shades stood near them. One with eyes like the old man’s and the other with a mouth like Shava’s. The old couple clung to one another as they steadied themselves and stood, oblivious to the deathly past that surrounded them.

“Dyeda,” the old woman said.

At that Riven could no longer contain her guilt and shame.

“I did it.” The words fell from Riven’s lips with an empty hollowness. She would accept her fate at the hands of these people. She would let them pass judgment and she would answer for her crimes.

“I killed your Elder,” she told them, breathless. Her ragged confession filled the room. “I killed them all.”

Built on perpetual conflict, Noxus has never had a shortage of war orphans. Her father lost to an unnamed battle and her mother to the girl’s own stubborn birth, Riven was raised on a farm run by the empire on the rocky hillsides of Trevale.

Physical strength and ferocious will kept the children alive and working on the hard scrap of land, but Riven hungered for more than simply bread on the table. She watched conscriptors from regional warbands visiting the farms, year after year, and in them, she saw a chance at the life she dreamed of. When she finally pledged the empire her strength, she knew Noxus would embrace her as the daughter she longed to be.

Riven proved a natural soldier. Young as she was, her years of hard labor allowed her to quickly master the weight of a longsword taller than herself. Her new family was forged in the heat of battle, and Riven saw her bond to her brothers- and sisters-in-arms as unbreakable.

So exceptional was her dedication to the empire, that Boram Darkwill himself recognized her with a runic blade of dark metal, enchanted by a pale sorceress within his court. The weapon was heavier than a kite shield and nearly as broad—perfectly suited to Riven’s tastes.

Not long after, the warhosts set sail for Ionia as part of the long-planned Noxian invasion.

As this new war dragged on, it became clear that Ionia would not kneel. Riven’s unit was assigned to escort another warband making its way through the embattled province of Navori. The warband’s leader, Emystan, had employed a Zaunite alchymist, eager to test a new kind of weapon. Across countless campaigns, Riven would gladly have given her life for Noxus, but now she saw something awry in these other soldiers—something that made her deeply uncomfortable. The fragile amphorae they carried on their wagons had no purpose on any battlefield she could imagine...

The two warbands met increasingly fierce resistance, as if even the land itself sought to defy them. During a heavy rain storm, with mud pouring down the hillsides, Riven and her warriors were stranded with their deadly cargo—and it was then that the Ionian fighters revealed themselves. Seeing the danger, Riven called to Emystan for support.

The only answer she received was a flaming arrow, fired out from the ridgeline, and Riven understood this was no longer a war to expand the borders of Noxus. It was to be a complete annihilation of the enemy, no matter the cost.

The wagon was hit straight on. Instinctively, Riven drew her sword, but it was too late to protect anyone but herself. Chemical fire burst from the ruptured containers, and screams filled the night—both Ionian and Noxian falling victim to an agonizing, gruesome death. Shielded from the scorching, poisonous mists by the magic of her blade, she bore unwilling witness to scenes of horror and betrayal that would haunt her forever.

For Riven, memories of the hours that followed come only in fragments, and nightmares. She bound her wounds. She mourned the dead. But, most of all, she came to hate the sword that saved her life. The words carved into its surface mocked her, reminding her of all she had lost. She would find a way to break it, severing her last tie to Noxus, before the dawn.

But when the blade was finally shattered, still she found no peace.

Stripped of the faith and conviction that had bolstered her entire life, Riven chose to exile herself, wandering Ionia’s battle-scarred landscape. When she finally returned to the village where she had broken the sword, it was revealed that her self-destructive needs had cost the life of their most revered elder... and yet Ionia embraced her with forgiveness.

Noxus was not nearly so merciful. Although the empire had long since withdrawn from the First Lands, it had not forgotten about Riven, or her runic blade. After fighting fiercely against those sent to bring her to justice, she refused to let any more Ionian blood be shed on her account, and surrendered herself to the charges of desertion leveled against her.

As she returns to Noxus in chains, Riven remains haunted. Though Darkwill is no more, and the empire is rumored to have evolved, she is uncertain what will become of her, or whether she will ever be made whole again.

The knife-edge of the plow cut through the rough topsoil, turning the underbelly of winter toward the spring sky. Riven walked the small field behind the ox-driven rig, her focus caught between steadying the wide set handles and the foreign words she clumsily held in her mouth.

“Emai. Fair. Svasa. Anar.”

Each step filled the air with the loamy scent of newly awakened earth. Riven gripped the wood tightly as she walked. Over the last few days the coarse handles had roused dormant calluses and fleeting memories.

Riven bit her lip, shaking off the thought, continuing with the work at hand. “Mother. Father. Sister. Brother.”

The thin-ribbed ox flicked an ear as it pulled, the plow kicking up clots and small rocks. They struck Riven, but she paid them no mind. She wore a rough woven shirt, the dirt-speckled sleeves rolled into thick bands. Pants of the same material had been dyed an earthen yellow. Their cuffed edges would now be too short on the man they had been made for, but on her, they brushed her bare ankles and the tops of her simple, mud-caked shoes.

“Emai. Fair. Svasa. Anar.” Riven continued the mantra, memorizing the words. “Erzai, son. Dyeda…”

Without slowing her pace she wiped a strand of sweat soaked hair from her eyebrow with her sleeve. Her arms were well muscled and still easily held the plow one-handed. The farmer had gone up to the house for a skin of water and their lunch. The old man said she could stop and wait on the threshold of the shaded forest that bordered the tract, but Riven had insisted on finishing.

A fresh breeze caught the damp at the back of her neck, and she looked around. The Noxian Empire had tried bending Ionia to its will. When Ionia wouldn’t kneel, Noxus had tried to break it. Riven continued her meditative pace behind the plow. For all the Empire’s strength, spring would still come to this land. It had been more than a year since Noxus had been driven out, and the grays and browns of rain and mud were finally giving way to shoots of green. The air itself seemed to hold new beginnings. Hope. Riven sighed as her hair’s bluntly cut edges brushed her chin.

“Dyeda. daughter,” she began her invocation again, determined. She gripped the wooden handles again with both hands. “Emai. Fair.”

“That's fa-ir,” a voice called out from the shadows of the forest.

Riven stopped suddenly. The plow handles lurched in her hands as the bony ox was brought up short by the leather reins. The plow kicked hard into a tough clod of dirt and gave a metal twang as a stone caught on the cutting edge.

The voice did not belong to the old man.

Riven tried to ease her breathing by exhaling slowly through her lips. There was one voice, but there could be more coming for her. She fought the years of training that urged her to take a defensive stance. Instead she stilled her body, facing the plow and beast before her. Riven felt too light. She held on tightly now to the plow’s wooden handles. There should have been a weight that anchored her, grounded her, at her side. Instead, she could hardly feel the small field knife on her right hip. The short, hooked blade was good for cutting dew apples and stubborn vegetation, nothing more.

“The word is fa-ir.”

The speaker revealed himself at the edge of the field, where the farmland met a band of thick amber pines.

“There is a break in the middle,” the man said, stepping forward. A wild mane of dark hair was pulled back off his face. A woven mantle was tucked around his shoulders. Riven noticed that it did not completely cover the metal pauldron on his left shoulder, nor the unsheathed blade at his side. He was of a warrior class, but did not serve one house or precinct. He was a wanderer.

Dangerous, she decided.

“Fa-ir,” he pronounced again.

Riven did not speak, not for lack of words, but because of the accent she knew they would carry. She moved around the plow, putting it between her and the well-spoken stranger. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and bent to examine the plow’s blade, feigning interest in the stone she had struck. Meant to cut through sod and clay, the blade would be more useful than the field knife. She had watched the old man fix it to the wooden body that morning and knew how to release it.

“I don’t remember seeing you in the village when I was here last, but I have been away awhile,” the man said. His voice held the indifferent roughness of a long time lived on the road.

The ever present insect hum became louder as Riven refused to fill the silence between them.

“I’ve heard that the magistrates are being called to hear new evidence in the case of Elder Souma’s death,” the man continued.

Riven ignored him and patted the patient ox. She ran her fingers along the leather straps as someone who was familiar with the trappings of horses and farm animals, batting away a gnat from the ox’s big, dark eyes.

“Then again, if you are new to this land, perhaps you know little of the murder.”

She looked up at the word, meeting the stranger’s gaze, the innocent beast between them. A scar stretched across the bridge of the man’s nose. Riven wondered if the one who left that mark still lived. There was hardness in the stranger’s eyes, but under that, curiosity. Riven felt the ground tremble through the soles of her thin leather shoes. There was a sound like rolling thunder, but there were no clouds in the sky.

“Someone’s coming,” the man said with a smile.

Riven looked over her shoulder at the hill that led to the old man’s farmhouse. Six armed riders crested the little ridge and marched their mounts down to the small harrowed field.

“There she is,” one of them said. His accent was thick, and Riven struggled to parse the nuance of language she had been trying so hard to learn.

“But... is she alone?” another asked, squinting at the shadows between the trees.

A quick breeze wrapped around the plow and Riven, sliding back into the shadows of the forest. Riven looked to where the stranger once stood, but he was gone, and the approaching riders left no time to wonder.

“A ghost maybe,” the leader said laughing at his man. “Someone she cut down coming back for revenge.”

The riders spurred their horses into a trot, circling Riven and crushing the even trenches she had dug that morning. The leader carried a rigid bundle wrapped in cloth over the back of his mount. Riven’s eyes followed that horse as the others moved around her, their hooves compacting the loose earth back into cold, hard clay.

She gave the plow blade a final glance. Two riders carried crossbows. She would be taken down before she reached even one of them. Her fingers itched to touch the potential weapon, but her mind begged them to be still.

Tightness quickened in her muscles. A body long trained to fight would not surrender so easily to peace. A deafening rush of blood began to pound in her ears. You will die, it roared, but so will they.

Riven’s fingers began to reach for the plow blade.

“Leave her be!” The voice of the farmer’s wife was strong from calling in errant cows and it rang out over the field, breaking Riven from her self-destructive urge. “Asa, hurry. You must do something.”

The riders halted their circles around Riven as the farmer and his wife crested the hill. Riven bit hard on the inside of her cheek. The sharp pain centered her, quelling her urge to fight. She would not spill Ionian blood in their field.

“I told you to stay in your home until we were done,” the leader said to them.

The old man, Asa, hobbled through the uneven dirt. “She’s done nothing wrong. I was the one who brought it,” he said gesturing toward the wrapped bundle. “I will answer for it.”

“Master Konte. O-fa,” the leader said. A patronizing smile tugged at the corners of his thin lips. “You know what she is. She has committed many wrongs. If I had my way, she would be cut down where she stands,” He looked Riven over, then wrinkled his nose in annoyance. “Unfortunately, old man, you can say your piece at the hearing.”

While the leader spoke Riven’s feet had sunk into the moist earth, momentarily holding her fast. The feeling of being mired, pulled down, overwhelmed her. Her pulse quickened to a shallow beat and a cold sweat slipped between her shoulders as she struggled to pull free. Her mind was enveloped by a different time, a different field. There the horses snorted, their hooves trampling blood-soaked dirt.

Riven shut her eyes before more remembered horrors could bury her. She inhaled deeply. A spring rain floods this ground, not the dead, she told herself. When I open my eyes, there will be only the living.

When she opened her eyes, the field was a field, freshly turned, and not an open grave. The leader of the riders dismounted and approached her. In his hand he held a pair of shackles, swirls of Ionian metal far more beautiful than anything that would have chained criminals in her own homeland.

“You cannot escape your past, Noxian dog,” the leader said with a quiet triumph.

Riven looked up from plow blade to the old couple. The lines on their faces already carried so much pain. She would not bring them more. She could not. Riven tried to hold onto the image, the two of them leaning into one another, each holding the other up. It was a moment of fragile defiance before they knew something would be taken. When the old man wiped a sleeve across his wet cheek, she had to turn away.

Riven shoved her wrists toward the leader of the riders. She met his smug grin with a cold stare and let the steel close over her skin.

“Do not worry, dyeda,” the farmer’s wife called out. Riven could hear the taut hope in her voice. It was too much. Too much hope. The wind carried the strained words and the smell of freshly turned earth, even as Riven was led farther and farther away. “Dyeda,” it whispered. “We will tell them what you are.”

“Dyeda,” Riven whispered back. “Daughter.”

For two days after the girl surrendered, there had been nothing for Shava Konte to do but help her husband slowly repair the trampled furrows and plant the field. It was a task made easier by the girl’s labors, and yet, if their sons still lived, it was one she and Asa should not have had to do at all.

On the cold morning of the tribunal, knowing it would take more time for their older bones to walk the long road into town, the couple left before dawn to reach the village council hall.

“They know she is Noxian.”

“You worry too much,” Shava said, clucking her tongue for good measure. Realizing her tone was more fit for calming chickens than her husband, she gave him a hopeful smile.

“Noxian. That is all they need to proclaim guilt.” Asa mumbled his thought into the homespun wool wrapped around his neck.

Shava, who had spent the better part of her lifetime coaxing stubborn animals into the butcher’s pen, stopped short, turning to face her husband.

“They do not know her like we know her,” she said, stabbing one of her fingers to his chest, exasperation escaping through her hands. “That is why you are to speak on her behalf, you old goat.”

Asa knew his wife, and knew further argument would not change her mind. Instead he nodded his head softly. Shava gave a dissatisfied harumph and turned back to the road, marching in silence to the town center. The council hall that was beginning to fill. Seeing the crowd, she hurried into the narrow space between the benches of the council hall to find a seat closer to the front... and unceremoniously tripped over a sleeping man’s leg.

As the old woman fell forward with a weak yelp, a groan escaped from the sleeping man. Like a lightning blade, his hand snapped forward, his grip like steel, catching the old woman by the arm before she fell to the stone floor.

“You must watch your step, O-ma,” the stranger whispered deferentially, drink still heavy on his breath, but slurring none of his words. He withdrew his hand as soon as the old woman was back on her feet.

The old woman looked down her nose at the unlikely savior, her eyes narrowing. Under her scrutiny, the man receded further into the shadows of the mantle wrapped around his shoulders and face; the ghost of a scar across his strong nose disappeared into the darkness.

“The council hall is nowhere to recover from a night of misdeeds, young man.” Shava righted her robes, the disdain evident in the tip of her chin. “A woman’s life is to be decided today. Be gone before you are asked to concede your own wrongdoings before the magistrates.”

“Shava.” The old man had caught up and put a hand on his wife’s arm. “You must keep your temper in check if we are to offer our assistance today. He meant no injury. Leave him be.”

The hooded stranger offered two fingers up in peaceful supplication, but kept his face hidden. “You strike to the heart of the matter, O-ma,” he offered, humor creeping into his voice.

Shava moved on, carrying her indignation like a delicate gift. The old man tipped his head as he passed.

“Do not judge her quickly, my boy. She worries that an innocent soul will be found guilty before the truth is known.”

The hooded man grunted in acknowledgement as the old man moved on. “On that we are of the same mind, O-fa.”

The old man glanced back at the strange, hushed words. The seat was empty, save the ghost of a breeze that rustled the robes of a nearby couple deep in conversation. The hooded stranger was already receding into the far shadows of the council hall.

The magistrates, their smooth vestments settling behind them as they took their place at the head table, looked out at the crowded hall. The noise in the great room dropped to an uneven silence. One of the three, a tall, slim woman with a falcon nose, stood solemnly.
“This tribunal has been called to take in new attestations in the matter of Elder Souma’s death.”

A hum of murmurs, like a hundred locusts, began to build from somewhere in the middle of the crush of people. Some had heard of the new evidence the judge spoke, but most had gathered at the rumor there was a Noxian in their midst. But rumors didn’t change what they all knew: Elder Souma’s death was no mystery. The wind technique, the magic that scoured his meditation hall was all the evidence that was necessary. Only one besides Souma himself could have executed such a maneuver.

A wound, unevenly healed, opened. The hive mind of the crowd coalesced in a moment of communal pain. If the elder had not fallen, they shouted to each other, the village would not have taken such heavy casualties. Shortly after the murder, half of a Noxian warband had slaughtered many on the way to Navori. So many sons and daughters had been lost in the Noxian engagement, an engagement that swelled in the distressing imbalance of Souma’s death. Worse yet, the village laid the blame on one of their own.

The thrum found a clear voice.

“We already know who murdered Elder Souma,” Shava spoke through weathered lips. “It was that traitor, Yasuo.”

The crowd nodded and a biting agreement rippled through the mob.

“Who knew Elder Souma’s wind techniques? Yasuo!” Shava added. “And now Yone has not returned from the pursuit of his unforgivable brother. Most likely the coward is responsible for that as well.”

The crowd’s gnashing grew again, this time crying out for Yasuo's blood. Shava settled more easily on the bench, satisfied that the question of guilt had been pointed back at the correct person.

The falcon-nosed judge came from a long line of woodweavers, ones famed for being able to untwist and straighten even the heaviest burls. She lifted a perfectly round sphere of hard worn chestnut and brought it down definitively against its jet-black cradle. The sharp sound wrenched the crowd into silence and order returned to the hall.

“This court seeks knowledge and enlightenment about the facts of Elder Souma’s death,” the judge said. “Do you wish to stand in way of enlightenment, Mistress…?”

The old woman looked to her husband and felt heat rise in the skin of her cheeks. “Konte. Shava Konte,” she said much less boldly. She dipped her head. The old man on the stool watched her and mopped the sheen of sweat from his own balding crown.

“As I was saying, we are here to take in new evidence.” The falcon judge looked out at the crowd for any other stubborn burls and nodded to the bailiff, Melker. “Please bring her in.”

Far, far from the harsh deserts of the Great Sai, over savanna plains and mountain steppes, lie the great jungles on the border of Ixtal and Shurima. Swathed in mystery, they are home to wild, fantastical beasts, and dense forests blooming with life. But while there is overwhelming beauty to be found there, danger and death lurk nearby in equal measure.

No one knows how Nidalee—in the form of a cub—came to be alone in the heart of the jungle, but it was her cries echoing through the trees that captured the attention of the jungle's fiercest cats: the pakaa.

A mother, roaming with her cubs, approached Nidalee. Perhaps it was her scent, or a mother’s intuition, that led the great cat to accept this strange kit without hesitation, half-leading, half-dragging her back to their den. 

Nidalee was raised in the company of the pakaa, who treated her as one of their own—a creature of the jungle. She grew up playing alongside the other cubs, learning to hunt with tooth and claw and to stalk the jungles for her prey. She grew into her role as a member of the pack and as a capable huntress.

Even so, at times Nidalee began to lose control of her own body. Without warning, her paws would change to strange hairless hands and feet, her sharp fangs to blunted teeth. Occasionally she would stumble from the den, delirious with fever, her body caught in a state of half-transformation as she followed the hazy silhouettes of two strange figures—they whispered after her, their voices jumbled but sweet. They brought Nidalee a sense of comfort and warmth, even though her feline family had taught her to be wary of outsiders.

And with good cause.

It was at the height of the summer rains when she first encountered the Kiilash. These vastayan hunters ranged into the forests every season in search of prestigious kills and trophies to show their prowess. Nidalee's mother tried to chase them away, but fell, wounded by their blades and spears.

But before the Kiilash could finish the aging wildcat, Nidalee lunged from the undergrowth, howling with grief and rage. As she tore into them with razor sharp claws and fangs, they rounded on her with even stronger weapons. 

But something had changed.

She felt the spirit of another heritage, long forgotten, rise up within her. Transforming from pakaa to something resembling a human, she grabbed a hunter's lunging weapons with cat-like reflexes and nimble fingers and turned it upon her enemies. The Kiilash growled and hissed at this sight, and to her surprise Nidalee found she understood some of their speech.

They cursed her, invoking the name of their Vastayashai'rei ancestors as they retreated from the fight, empty-handed.

Hurling the spear aside, Nidalee held her dying mother close. Her siblings approached, wary of her new form but comforted by her familiar scent. With the passing of their mother they came to accept this shapechanger as their new leader—from that day forth, she vowed to defend her adopted home against any who would seek to plunder it.

Over time, she learned to better control her powers, eventually shifting between both forms with ease. She also became more adept with her new form, learning to take advantage of her surroundings while building traps and weapons unknown to the pakaa, crafting healing salves from honeyfruit, and utilizing seeds and flowers to protect and illuminate her territory. And in the back of her mind, she wondered whether she was the only one of the pakaa who could change their shape.

Perhaps it was a yearning to find others of her kind that led her to the chameleon-like wanderer Neeko, and the two became inseparable for a time. Nidalee delighted in mentoring her inquisitive new companion, and they reveled in exploring the jungle's numerous wonders together, before Neeko eventually departed to follow her own destiny beyond Shurima's shores.

Even now, the dense forests remain the last truly untamed wilderness in the known world, and something of an enigma even to Nidalee. Still, in rare, quiet moments, the huntress finds herself dwelling on her own origins—and her encounter with the Kiilash—and whether she will learn the truth behind any of it…

To assume the Aspects act in the interests of Targon or its people is folly of the highest order.

When the first Rakkor climbed the Great Mountain, they did so to bring themselves closer to their holy sun, the divine source of all light and majesty in this world. But when they reached the summit, they found strange, otherworldly beings waiting there for them.

Not gods. There are no gods on the mountain, nor above it. The Aspects have never claimed this, and the Rakkor have never considered them as such. In spite of all their heavenly power, they had descended from the firmament of the celestial realm, yet were still unable to cross over into Runeterra unaided—and this was something for which they would be willing to bargain most dearly. Enough to use our own worst natures against us. Enough to betray the golden sun itself.

To this day, the Aspects strive to manipulate a world that is not theirs, for reasons we cannot fully comprehend, on a timescale that mocks even the grandest of mortal ambitions.

However, we can be certain that their motivations are not human, and their capacity for cruelty and deception is unmatched in all existence.

— from ‘Tribe of the Last Sun’, by the Hierarch Malgurza of Helia

Weary from the day’s labors, Iula wiped her stiff hands upon her apron, and raised a cup to the mantel.

“Here’s to you, my love,” she whispered, before bringing it to her lips.

A flood of sweetness. Warmth. The last rays of an autumnal sunset.

She measured the taste for a moment, letting it sit on her palate, breathing out slowly through her nose. Then she looked down into her drink and gently swirled the golden liquid around.

“How is it?” Hanne asked, as she heaved the farmhouse door closed behind her.

Iula shrugged. “It’s fine. Maybe it will age into something better.”

The younger woman set down two large sacks of grain on the floor beside the kitchen table, and poured a cup for herself. Iula watched her sniff it, and take a long swig.

Then Hanne coughed, and blinked hard, twice.

A third time.

“You can... You can really taste the smoke...” she managed. “Is mead always... like this?”

Iula smiled, running her fingers through the bunches of herbs hanging from the roof beams. “No, not always. Depends what you put in. For a traditional medu, I hoped the hedge-sage would come through a little stronger. Maybe next time we’ll use more. And fresh, not dried.”

“Are we still taking it to the market, though? Will it be ready by then?”

“It’s fine. We can backsweeten each jar with a little more honey, before I seal them.”

Hanne finished her cup with only the slightest hint of a grimace, before setting it down. “I think I saw one last honeycomb in the storehouse,” she said. “I’ll bring it in.”

“There’s no rush. I’m not doing it tonight. Need to start on the sourdough before bed.”

“It’s no trouble!” Hanne insisted. “I’ll go now, before I get this young man his supper.”

Little Tomis was still seated at the table, swinging his bare feet back and forth. Even though the day had been long, his eyes were still keen... and very much fixed on the drink in Iula’s hand.

“Can I have some?” he asked, the moment Hanne was gone.

Iula made a show of turning to face him with an expression of mock-confusion. “You mean this lovely stew that Hanne has made for us all?” she said, gesturing to the fireplace with her cup.

Tomis shook his head. “No. The medu.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s a good idea, is it?” she replied, stepping over the bench to sit next to him. Her knees and elbows creaked as she went—but her knees and elbows always creaked, so she had given up remarking on it years ago.

She tapped the large glass jar next to him.

“What about your fine batch of sun tea, eh? Wouldn’t you rather have some of that? We spent all day on it, and you’ve been very helpful! I’ve been looking forward to trying it.”

Tomis wrinkled his nose. “I don’t like sun tea anymore.”

“Oh, that’s not true! It’s a very special drink for a young Rakkor. It fills you up from top to toe with the blessings of the Sun. Don’t you want that?”

The boy went very quiet, and still. His eyes sank to the tabletop.

“Then why do you put your drink in the dark?” he murmured, plaintively. “Does that mean it’s bad?”

Iula was suddenly worried that she had gone too far. “Oh, no,” she chuckled, putting her arm around him, “it’s not bad. Not bad at all. My dear husband taught me how to make mead, when we were first married. It needs to sit in the dark for a while to... umm... to get more... sort of...”

Then she gave up trying to explain fermentation to a four-year-old, and playfully poked his nose.

“Look, my boy, some of the best things that grown-ups enjoy happen in the dark, all right? One day, when you’re older and taller, you’ll understand that. And then you can have a sip of mead! But for now, it’s sun tea for us both! Can you spare my tired old feet, and bring me two clean cups?”

Tomis giggled, and scurried away to the pantry. Iula watched him go, before craftily gulping down the last of her drink, just as the farmhouse door opened.

“Actually, Tam,” she spluttered, “bring three. Hanne’s back, and she’ll want—”

“Iula.”

Something in Hanne’s tone chilled Iula’s blood. She was on her feet before she realized it, moving to join the girl in the open doorway. “What is it?”

“There’s someone coming. I think... I think it’s a Solari.”

Iula strained her eyes into the twilight gloom of the valley, past the dusty yard of their simple homestead, and the fields of empyrean wheat beyond.

There.

True enough, she could just make out the distant, haggard form of a man clad in dulled, golden battleplate. He was moving slowly through the crop, but there could be no doubt as to his intended destination. Iula’s home was remote and secluded, the nearest neighbors several hours to the north.

She sighed, steeling her nerve, and strode into the yard.

“Greetings, friend,” she called out. “May the Sun’s light be upon you. I hope your journey through the mountains has not been too hard.”

The man did not respond, nor halt in his approach.

Iula continued. “I can offer you food and water, but I am sorry to say warriors are no longer welcome in the house that I once shared with my beloved. Perhaps you have heard of him? Pylas of the Ra’Horak. A worthy hero of the Solari, some forty years past. I have the countenance of the priesthood in recognition of his service. You will find no enemies here, I assure you.”

Still, the man did not respond.

He crossed the bottom ditch. He was now barely a hundred yards from the house.

“Hanne,” Iula said calmly, “please go get my husband’s sword.”

The girl did not move. Her wide eyes were fixed on the approaching figure.

Iula shot her a serious glance.

“The sword hanging above the fireplace. Bring it here. Now. And make sure Tomis is hidden.”

There was something curious about this warrior. As he drew closer, she could see that his deep blue cloak was ragged and stained from battle, and his shield hung limply at his side. His spear, the haft pitted and bent, dragged in the dirt behind him as though it might be a beggar-king’s plow.

Iula took a step back. She did not know why the man had come... but if he meant the three of them harm, she would be ready to fight back.

Hanne tumbled out of the house with the sheathed sword clutched to her chest, letting out a whimper when she saw the warrior heave himself onto the path that ran between the yard and the fields. He stumbled, and Iula noticed that his left sandal was flapping loosely from his bloodied foot.

Her heartbeat thundered in her ears.

“...Atreus?”

The warrior stopped at the sound of his own name. The spear slipped from his grasp.

And then he was falling.

Though neither of them consciously intended it, Iula and Hanne both lunged forward in a vain attempt to catch him; some instinctive, mortal reaction to seeing true divinity humbled and laid low.

But of course, they could not.

Atreus, once known as Pantheon and the Aspect of War, crashed face-first onto the flagstones, his helm seeming to ring like a cracked temple bell as it rolled away into the dusk.

On the fourth day, he awoke. Iula did not hear him climb from his bed, pulling on the freshly washed and dried tunic that she and Hanne had left out for him, nor creep down the gritty stone passageway to the kitchen.

The first she knew of his recovery, at all, was when the unmistakable smell of burning reached her nostrils.

She hauled herself out of her simple cot in a daze, her heart pounding.

“Hanne!” she yelled. “Hanne, get Tam!”

The floor was cold beneath her feet, but she did not think to look for her sandals. She threw the dividing curtain aside, cursing when her shoulder struck the wooden jamb as she passed beneath it.

There was smoke in the passageway.

“Hanne!”

Wincing, cradling her shoulder, she drummed a fist on the rough stone wall of Hanne’s small room all the way down to the kitchen, before remembering that the girl would have left for market hours earlier. Iula would have to deal with this alone.

Then she turned the corner, and stopped abruptly.

Atreus was crouched before the bread oven in the fireplace, frantically fanning a small blaze with his shield. His eyes were raw from the smoke, his hands smeared with flour and soot.

He looked over his shoulder at Iula.

“Forgive me,” he choked. “I... I don’t know what I...”

She let out a cry of exasperation and grabbed a flagon of water from the pantry.

“Get out of the way, you big oaf!”

Steam billowed from the oven as the fire was quenched. Iula coughed and wheezed, dropping the flagon so she could cover her mouth and nose with her nightsmock. She glared at the warrior standing sheepishly in the middle of the room.

“What are you waiting for? Get the damn door open,” she snapped at him, even as she hobbled over to the window and pushed the shutters outward. The morning sun streamed into the gloom, becoming almost solid bars of light in the haze.

Atreus opened the door, then thought for a moment, and started moving it back and forth to waft fresher air inside. Iula shot him a withering glare, before lowering herself to her knees in front of the oven, to inspect the damage.

“Well, that’s the whole batch ruined,” she muttered, gingerly plucking one of the sodden, blackened loaves from the mess. The stone base groaned and ticked as it cooled, with a slurry of ashes and water splattering down onto the floor beneath the open grate. “And the fire’s dead too. It took me a whole day to get it up to the right heat, you know.”

She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder, in Atreus’ direction.

“I told you last time you were here—you will never be a baker. Just give up.”

He continued to waft with the door, as if it were the most important task in the world. “The girl,” he murmured. “She asked me to mind the bread. Before she left.”

Iula got back to her feet with some effort. “You spoke to Hanne?”

Atreus nodded. He looked around for something to prop the door open, before shrugging and using his shield. Even when he stood again, she noted that he would not look her in the eye, and kept his gaze on the floor between them.

And she could not quite shake the sense that he looked somehow... lesser than she remembered. Diminished, perhaps. In the past, he had always radiated a kind of stubborn defiance, one that reassured his allies and unsettled those who might seek to oppose him.

That was gone, now.

He ran his fingers through his beard, apparently trying to find a specific combination of words that he wanted to speak. “I wanted to... I want to find a way to repay you, Iula. For all your many kindnesses to me, over the years.”

She scoffed. “Well, we’ll have to find something outside of the kitchen, won’t we. Maybe I’ll let you till the fields before I sow again, next season. Not even you can set mud on fire. At least, I hope not. Maybe I’m wrong.”

A glimmer of a smile crossed his features, but it was only a glimmer.

Then his gaze darted past her, to the passageway.

Iula looked to see Tomis standing there, peering around the corner, gripping the edge of the wall with his little fingers. She smoothed out her smock, and beckoned to him.

“Come here, Tam. Come and say hello. This is the man we’ve been helping. His name is Atreus—we’ve been friends for a long time. A very long time. Although you wouldn’t know it from looking at him, eh?”

The boy did not move. Neither did Atreus.

Sighing, she trudged over and scooped Tomis up, letting him lean into her bruised shoulder as she carried him into the kitchen. “He’s a little afraid of you, I think. You’re the first soldier he’s seen, since...” The words died on her lips. She smiled down at the boy, and blew an affectionate raspberry into his hair. “Well. He’s an orphan. These past few years have not been kind to the folk of the high valleys.”

Atreus looked from Iula to Tomis, and back again.

“He is not yours?”

Iula laughed. “Are you being serious? I am never quite sure with you.”

Atreus’ eyes fell to the floor again. “I... I don’t...”

“No, Atreus. I can tell you this very young boy is not my son. And before you ask, no, Hanne is not my daughter either. I’m sixty-eight years old, and I know I look it, so don’t try to flatter me into forgiving you for the burned bread, either. I know you don’t ever seem to age, but the rest of us mortals bloody well do.”

Then she looked at the warrior standing before her, a man she had known almost all her life, and saw something she had never seen before.

His eyes were brimming with tears. He was trembling.

She made to take a step toward him, but Tomis squirmed uncomfortably in her arms at the prospect, and she lowered him to the floor instead. “Go on, young man. Back to your room. I’ll bring you some breakfast shortly.”

In spite of her reassuring smile, the boy still edged out of the kitchen most warily. Iula turned back to Atreus, who had stooped to pick up the flagon.

“You’ve been gone so long,” she said, reaching out to place a reassuring hand on his arm. “I was beginning to wond—”

Atreus reacted to her touch as though struck by summer lightning.

“Get away from me!” he bellowed, recoiling with such force that he crashed over the low wooden bench, and split his forehead on the corner of the table.

Iula started away, almost losing her balance as well.

Atreus covered his face with one hand, and tried to regain both his footing and his composure. He backed into the space behind the open door, and brought his knees up like a wall between him and the rest of the world. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me,” he repeated again and again, under his breath.

It had pained her to see him physically broken, but Iula knew now that the wounds he must recently have suffered ran far deeper than his flesh.

And that, that hurt her more than anything else she could imagine.

She folded her arms tightly across her chest, sobbing gently, grasping the fabric of her smock, and sank down to sit opposite him on the floor.

They sat there for some time. Iula said nothing for a goodly while, watching the sunlight through the window move slowly across the gray tiles, and not thinking about the rheumatic ache in her joints, or the chill in her toes.

Eventually, when Atreus seemed to have calmed enough to let his head sink a little, she wiped her eyes with her sleeves and cleared her throat.

“What happened to you, old friend?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t... I don’t really remember.”

“What do you remember? Do you recall the last time you were here? The last time we saw each other?”

He frowned a little. “I think so. How long ago was it?”

“Six years, Atreus. I haven’t seen you in six years.”

Her words seemed to hang in the air longer than she had intended. She watched him attempt to process them in light of whatever it was he wanted to tell her.

“I... I think I went back to the peak,” he murmured. “I think I climbed the mountain again.”

Iula’s eyes widened. “But...”

“I know. It shouldn’t be possible. And yet, there it is.”

It was beyond anything she had ever considered. Certainly, there were legends that pre-dated even the empire of Shurima, of climbers who reached the summit of Mount Targon and yet were claimed by no Aspect, who then managed against all odds to make their way back down and return to their people; whether in shame or triumph, it was often unclear in the telling, and usually considered nothing more than fanciful allegory.

But the notion that any mortal, even an Aspect’s host, might make the climb twice...

It was unheard of.

She laughed, clapping her open palm on the floor. “My old friend,” she beamed, “if ever someone was going to rewrite the rules of the world, it would be you!”

Atreus shook his head, and Iula felt all levity fade.

“No,” he replied. “It wasn’t me.”

“Then who—”

“Viego.”

Even though she had never heard it before that moment, the name sent a shudder through her. She did not like to think that words, or names, could have power over the living. Maybe it was simply the way Atreus had spoken it, his gaze haunted and thin.

“Viego. The ancient king who brought the Black Mist to our lands. I tried to fight him, but he... uhh...”

Atreus rubbed absently at his scalp.

“He made me his puppet, Iula. I think I’ve done some terrible, terrible things.”

Iula was numb. She recalled Atreus’ disheveled state when he stumbled back into the valley, and how she and Hanne had not dared imagine what foes he must have faced to blunt the weapons and dull the armor of an Aspect.

Had they even been foes at all?

She hauled herself up onto her knees, and found she could not stop shaking her head in disbelief at the injustice of it all. “I’m sorry. I know how hard it was for you to be controlled by the Pantheon, all those years ago. This must have been... Oh, Atreus. I’m so truly sorry for what has happened to you, my friend.”

Slowly, cautiously, she reached out to him again. This time he did not flinch, but his face creased in pained sorrow.

“Oh, Atreus,” she said again, and took him in her arms, rocking gently back and forth with him on the kitchen floor. He clutched at her clothing with his scarred hands, his face pressed against her chest—not so very different from young Tomis in those early days after he first came to the homestead.

Close to tears herself, Iula closed her eyes.

“Tell me what you need, old friend,” she whispered. “Whatever I can do for you, I will. You know that.”

Atreus took a deeper breath to steady himself.

“I need you to tell me it’s okay to give up,” he replied.

Iula felt suddenly cold. “What?”

“There is too much evil in the world. You and I have both seen it. I’ve fought it for so long, I can’t remember what came before... but I’m tired. I’m so damn tired, Iula. How can mortals hope to win out against undying kings, or fallen god-warriors? The Aspects and their slaves. Demons from the spirit realm. Runeterra is becoming their playground. I thought all I needed to do was keep getting back up, no matter what. But if I can be made an enemy too, then simply being able to endure is no longer enough.”

He gritted his teeth, and looked her dead in the eye.

“And worst of all, I’ve lost whatever power I still held after my Aspect was slain. Viego must’ve seen to that. Whatever it was that connected me to the celestial realm, it’s gone. I am... I am just a man. So I need you to tell me that it’s okay for me to leave all this behind. You’re the only person I—”

Iula pushed him away, and clambered shakily to her feet. Adrenaline surged in her veins. She saw that this wasn’t just the absence of his comforting defiance, which for so many years had made her feel safer, just knowing he was out there, somewhere in the world.

He had actually given up.

“How dare you,” she murmured.

Atreus rose, confused, towering over her. He wiped his face with the back of his forearm.

“I don’t underst—”

“How dare you!” Iula shrieked. “How can you even think to ask that?”

He faltered, his fists clenching involuntarily. “I can’t do this anymore. Please.”

A sour taste rose in the back of her throat. Her anger was so fierce, so hot, that she couldn’t feel the floor beneath her feet anymore.

“Damn you,” she spat. “Damn you. Coward. How dare you say that to me.”

“Iula, please, listen to—”

She slapped him, hard, across the face.

And again.

He did not try to defend himself, but only stared down at her, dumbfounded, his cheek reddening quickly.

Iula could not weep. She was too enraged. “He loved you, Atreus! Pylas loved you more than any brother. He was my husband, but he went with you up that accursed mountain, even though I begged him not to. He was mine, and you lost him up there!” She let out a wordless cry of pain, and dug her nails into her forearms. “You got to hold him, Atreus. You got to hold him as he died. And what did I get?”

She pointed to the mantel, where Pylas’ blade hung.

“I got a sword. Nothing more.”

Iula squared her jaw and looked up into the clear, open sky she imagined beyond the ceiling beams.

“Don’t you dare tell me about what you’ve lost, and how you can’t go on anymore. You don’t get to retire. You don’t have that option. This isn’t about you. It never has been. I helped you because that’s what Pylas would have wanted. I even tried to become a soldier and follow you on the battlefield after he was gone. He died for you, so you could become something greater than any Ra’Horak. Greater than any mortal.”

Atreus shook his head. “But I’m not.”

Exasperated, she stomped to the fireplace and snatched down the blade, wrenching it from its sheath and pressing it to Atreus’ heart in one sweeping motion.

“Then we don’t need you! We may as well just let the Aspects have their war, and let that be the end of everything!”

The tip of the sun-tempered steel parted the threads of his tunic, and drew a trickle of blood from his breast. He looked down at the small crimson spot slowly spreading across the fabric.

Then he looked back to Iula.

“What war?” he asked, his voice sounding weak.

She tightened her grip on the sword, realizing only then that she did not know how she expected this to end.

“The Solari, Atreus. They see heresy everywhere. And they’re not just killing anyone they suspect of being a Lunari—but anyone suspected of harboring them, too.” Unable to take a hand off the hilt, she nodded instead toward the open passageway. “Tomis’ entire settlement. The Ra’Horak butchered them. This, this is what happens when the Aspects cloak themselves in mortal superstition. Your former brethren have been driven into darkness by the blinding light of their new savior.”

Something like recognition flickered across Atreus’ features, as if he were trying to recall a fading dream. “And the Aspect of the Moon... Of course, she has not yet stepped forward to lead the Lunari.”

“And how much worse will it all get, once she does?” Iula hissed. “You swore that you would stand against them, Atreus. That you would not let this world’s fate be decided by such inhuman monsters, even when they choose to do nothing. I am sorry for what has happened to you, I truly am... but I cannot let you break your oath. Not now.”

Atreus slowly, deliberately closed the fingers of his right hand around the sword blade. “Killing either the Aspect of Sun or Moon will not end the conflict in Targon. Just as the death of War did not lead to eternal peace.”

“Shut up. Stop trying to justify what you want, and do what you know you should. That little boy was absolutely terrified of you when you arrived, and yet he wanted to wear your helm and pick up your spear from the moment he saw them. If you won’t act now, then that’s the only future he has—growing up to fight and die like too many Rakkor before him.”

She forced as much conviction into her voice as she could muster.

“You need to get back up, Atreus. I didn’t want to be a widowed farmer. I didn’t want to inherit all this. I had to give up my life and my love, so now you need to prove you’re worthy of the faith my husband had in you. You need to honor the sacrifices we’ve all made. You need to stop the Aspects from destroying our people entirely.”

Atreus gripped Iula’s leading hand, gently urging her to drive the blade onward, his expression resolute.

“I can’t,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “I’m not strong enough.”

That was it. Iula was done.

She threw down the sword and barged past him, heading for Tomis’ room. “Well, if you’re going to just lay down and die, please pass on my love to my husband when you see him,” she yelled over her shoulder, before scooping up the startled child and hurrying out of the farmhouse in tears. She did not look back to see if Atreus was following them.

“Where are we going?” Tomis asked.

Iula winced as her bare feet were cut raw on the stony path, but did not slow her pace.

“We’re going to cut some more firewood, my boy,” she managed to smile. “We’re going to bake bread again today.”

When they returned, Atreus was gone.

Iula ignored the handwritten note that had been carefully placed beside Pylas’ sheathed sword on the kitchen table, and went to close the door.

Telling herself she was merely looking out for Hanne on her way back from market, she scanned the distant trackways that led up and out of the valley, but saw no sign of anyone.

She took a deep breath to calm herself, letting it out slowly as she walked back to the fireplace, and knelt before the cold oven with a grunt of discomfort. Then, without reading it, she balled up the note and stuffed it into the grate, and began to hum an old song from her youth as she stacked fresh kindling on top.

She genuinely hoped that would not be the last time she saw her old friend; that he would find his way out of the shadows, for all their sakes, by whatever path he had chosen.

But until then, she would sharpen her husband’s blade, and prepare to meet whatever was still to come.