LoL Universe Indexing and Search

We were running through the streets of Zaun. The pipes and stained glass were blurred, smeared colors against the Gray, and the fog that hung in every chem-soaked alley. Zori was to my left, all matted hair and rusty knives—her smile was the only sign that she was beautiful beneath the grime. Blenk was behind her, with a spray-philter full of glowing paint and a head dripping with ideas. Scuzz brought up the rear, every bit the kind of lug you’d expect to be called Scuzz. But he was our Scuzz, every scuzzy bit of him.

He yelled our gang’s name into the billowing smoke, marking the night as ours.

“Sump Riders!”

We laughed, and yelled it too. We were young, we were alive. Nothing could stop us. It would have to catch us first, and we were still running.

The city itself seemed to carry us forward as we slid down into its depths, farther and farther from the sump-scrapper we’d just robbed and left bleeding in the gutter. His cogs still jangled in our pockets. More than enough for a bit of fun. We were on our way to the Black Lanes, the market at the heart of Zaun.

“Think they’ll sell us any shimmerwine?” Zori asked. “Bleedin’ that sumper made me a mite parched.”

Blenk scoffed. “They’d sell shimmer to a child in the Lanes. And then they’d sell the child.”

“Gob it, both of you,” Scuzz growled, catching up. His face showed a kind of concern that I’d never seen before, a frown slowly forming. “Can’t you hear that?”

I squinted my eyes and peered into the night—since you can’t squint with ears, you ken? Not without a few augments. “I can’t hear nothin’,” I said with a shrug. “Not even a plague rat’s brown cough.”

“That’s what I mean,” Scuzz muttered.

And the silence after… It weighed heavier even than Piltover, glittering above us.

Pushing slowly into the market through the fog, we found dram-carts overturned, their wheels spinning lazily. Stalls abandoned, still full of exotic wares. There was a stench in the air that reminded me of the sump-scrapper—a stench strong enough to make my eyes water, when even seeing him bleed had not.

And there were bodies here, too. Many of them were wearing a chem-baron’s emblem. They’d been torn to pieces, the cobbles red beneath them.

It was a massacre.

“Nasty bit of work, eh?” Blenk grinned, rooting through one of the dead men’s pockets, carefully picking away giblets of flesh. “Guess that means we’re gettin’ a discount.”

Zori only shuddered. “There’s someone… in there,” she whispered, pointing into a cloud of raw chemtech that was spewing from a pipe in the clearing beyond. It was the source of the stench that was only growing stronger, crushing my senses, somehow making my ears hum. “It’s… It’s a man.”

“That’s not a man,” I murmured, following her gaze into the growing green veil. “Not anymore…”

It was a hulking shape, with mechanical legs and many guns, fused savagely to its flesh the way a mechanician would fuse two pipes. Burning and searing. Just looking at it made me wince. In one hand, it held a much smaller figure aloft. A man, choking in the chemtech cloud. As he writhed, the monster taunted him, its voice a mechanical buzz vibrating deep in my gut, threatening to loose the bowels within.

“This is what you want,” it almost cooed, cruelly forcing the man’s face into a rent in the pipe, the chemtech gas gushing out around them. “Breathe it. Make it yours.”

But the man only writhed, kicking uselessly, growing weaker and weaker—until finally, only his augmented arm still jittered, echoing his last, desperate thoughts. Even after they ceased.

And with that flash of brass, it hit me. The dangling corpse, he was a chem-baron, the only kind of person who could afford newfangled kit. Baron Crimson, or somesuch. These were his men, scattered around us.

Were his men. And now…

“We have to get out of here,” I gasped, turning from the carnage to my friends behind me. But I couldn’t see them. The gas from the pipe, it was spreading, a toxic green cloud making it harder to breathe… Harder to… to…

Run. We had to run.

I could hear Zori, Blenk and Scuzz panicking and coughing somewhere nearby. I reached out into the swirl for anyone, anything, to pull along with me as I made my escape. But there was only the sound of a body slumping softly to the ground, a spray-philter rattling across the cobbles.

Blenk. I stumbled as the truth hit me. He was gone.

And the worst was still to come.

The monster pushed itself through the cloud, a massive, armored leg slamming down beside me, and then another, and another—all revealed chemtech-filled tubing, and protruding gun muzzles that smoked with the very same heat still smoldering in the bodies around us.

I could taste it at the back of my throat, a truth as bitter as the acrid air. I was going to die here.

The monster grabbed me by my ragged scruff, lifting me close enough to see its face. It was a visage of terror, all the more horrifying because it was human. More human than the rest of him, at least. His tox-mask glowed as it vented pure alchemy, but his eyes were somehow even brighter. Intelligent. Almost seeming to smile as they took my fear in.

“A son of Zaun. What is your name?” he growled as he brought me closer. His accent was sharp, but I couldn’t place it. His words battered my resolve, each one hitting with the force of his hate.

I couldn’t even stammer an answer.

He laughed. “The baron, you recognize him? Like many, he tried to rule this city, casting countless people into the depths, to mine this…” He breathed in deeply as the gases swirled. “…this misery. Now he is no more, killed by that which gave him power over others. It is you, the gutter rat, at home in the squalor, who survives. So, tell me, which of you is stronger? Which of you deserves to live?”

Suddenly, I was falling back to the ground, landing on top of my friends. They were shuddering, choking as the chem-baron had. Scuzz, his mouth was foaming. And Zori… I closed my eyes against the tears before I could see what had happened to her.

“Run,” the monster said. “Tell the city how you survived and a baron did not. You will be my witness. The first of many.”

I hesitated.

“Run!” he bellowed. I saw Zori then, sobbing, reaching out for help with the last of her strength. I didn’t want this to be the way I would remember her. I wanted to remember her smile. I still do.

But I was running again, through the streets of Zaun.

And can you imagine how it felt to realize, with burning lungs and heaving breaths, that my screams were the message I was to bear?

I was alive. My friends were not.

I was worthy.

The battle spilled over like a feast before them. Such delicious life—so many to end, so many to hunt! Wolf paced in the snow while Lamb danced lithely from sword edge to spear tip, the red-blooded butchery never staining her pale coat.

“There is courage and pain here, Wolf. Many will gladly meet their end.” She drew up her bow and let loose an arc of swift finality.

The last breath of a soldier came with a ragged consent as his shield gave way to a heavy axe. Stuck in his heart was a single white arrow, shimmering with ethereal brilliance.

“Courage bores me,” the great black wolf grumbled as he tracked through the snow. “I am hungry and eager to chase.”

“Patience,” she murmured in his shaggy ear. As soon as the words left her, Wolf’s shoulders tensed and his body dropped low to the ground.

“I smell fear,” he said, trembling with excitement.

Across the muddied field of snow, a squire—too young for battle, but with blade in hand, nonetheless—saw that Kindred had marked all in the valley.

“I want the tender-thing. Does it see us, Lamb?”

“Yes, but it must choose. Feed the Wolf, or embrace me.”

The battle turned its steel toward the squire. He now stared at the roiling tide of bravery and desperation coming for him. This would be his last dawn. In that instant, the boy made his choice. He would not go willingly. Until his last breath, he would run.

Wolf snapped in the air and rolled his face in the snow like a new pup.

“Yes, dear Wolf.” Lamb’s voice echoed like a string of pearly bells. “Begin your hunt.”

With that, Wolf bounded across the field after the youth, a howl thundering through the valley. His shadowed body swept over the remains of the newly dead and their useless, shattered weapons.

The squire turned and ran for the woods until thick black trunks passed in a blur. He pressed on, the frozen air burning his lungs. He looked once more for his hunter, but could see nothing but the darkening trees. The shadows closed tightly around him and he suddenly realized there was no escape. It was the black body of Wolf that was everywhere at once. The chase was at its end. Wolf buried his sharp teeth in the squire’s neck, tearing out ribbons of vibrant life.

Wolf reveled in the boy’s scream and crunching bones. Lamb, who had trailed behind, laughed to see such sport. Wolf turned and asked, in a voice more growl than speech, “Is this music, Lamb?”

“It is to you,” she answered.

“Again,” Wolf licked the last drop of the youth’s life from his canine jaws. “I want to chase again, little Lamb.”

“There are always more,” she whispered. “Until the day there is only Kindred.”

“And then will you run from me?”

Lamb turned back to the battle. “I would never run from you, dear Wolf.”

As a mage born to a poor Demacian family, Sylas of Dregbourne was perhaps doomed from the start. Despite their low social standing, his parents were firm believers in their country’s ideals. So, when they discovered their son was “afflicted” with magical abilities, they convinced him to turn himself in to the kingdom’s mageseekers.

Noting the boy’s curious ability to sense magic, they used Sylas to identify other mages living among the citizenry. For the first time in his life he felt he had a future, a life in service to his country, and he performed these duties faithfully. He was proud, but lonely—forbidden from associating with anyone but his handlers.

Through his work, Sylas began to notice that magic was far more prevalent than Demacia cared to admit. He could sense glimmers of hidden power even among the wealthy and prominent… some of whom were the most outspoken decriers of mages. But while the poor were punished for their afflictions, the elite seemed above the law, and this hypocrisy planted the first seeds of doubt in Sylas’ mind.

Those doubts finally bloomed in one deadly, fateful event, when Sylas and his handlers encountered a mage living in hiding in the countryside. After discovering it was only a young girl, Sylas took pity on her. When he tried to shield the child from the mageseekers, he accidentally brushed against her skin. The girl’s magic rushed through Sylas’s body—but rather than killing him, it shot forth from his hands in raw, uncontrolled bursts. It was a talent he did not know he possessed, and it resulted in the deaths of three people, including his mageseeker mentor.

Knowing he would be called a murderer, Sylas went on the run, and quickly gained notoriety as one of the most dangerous mages in Demacia. Indeed, when the mageseekers found him, they showed no mercy.

Though he was still just a youth, Sylas was sentenced to life imprisonment.

He languished in the darkest depths of the mageseeker compound, forced to wear heavy shackles of magic-dampening petricite. Robbed of his arcane sight, his heart turned as hard as the stone that bound him, and he dreamed of vengeance on all who had put him there.

After fifteen wretched years, a young volunteer from the Illuminators named Luxanna began to visit him. Even with his shackles, Sylas recognized her as a singularly powerful mage, and over time the two forged an unusual and secretive bond. In exchange for Sylas’ knowledge of the control of magic, Lux educated him about the world outside his cell, and brought him whatever books he desired.

Eventually, through careful manipulation, he convinced the girl to smuggle a forbidden tome into his cell—the original writings of the great sculptor Durand, detailing his work with petricite.

The work revealed the secrets of the stone to Sylas. It was the foundation of Demacia’s defenses against harmful sorcery, but he came to see that it did not suppress magic, but absorb it.

And if the power was held within the petricite, Sylas wondered, could he release it…?

All he needed was a source of magic. A source like Lux.

But she never visited Sylas again. Her family, the immensely powerful Crownguards, had learned of their contact, and were furious that Lux had broken the law to help this vile criminal. Without explanation, it was arranged for Sylas to be executed.

On the scaffold, Lux pleaded for her friend’s life, but her cries fell on deaf ears. As the headsman pushed past her to raise his sword, Sylas managed to touch Lux. As he had predicted, her power surged into the petricite shackles, ready for him to unleash—and with that stolen magic, Sylas blasted his way free, sparing only the terrified young Crownguard.

He left the mageseeker compound not as an outcast, but as a new, defiant symbol of the broken and persecuted in Demacia. While traveling the kingdom in secret, he amassed a following of exiled mages… However, perhaps he always knew that even their combined power would not be enough to succeed in toppling the throne.

Which is why, with a band of his closest followers and several hardy oxen, Sylas eventually journeyed over the northern mountains to the frozen tundra of the Freljord.

There he seeks new allies, and the great elemental magic of ancient legend, so that he might return to Demacia and demolish the oppressive system that has made him and his fellow mages suffer for so long.

Diana did not belong on Mount Targon. A group of Solari hunters discovered her swaddled between her frost-claimed parents—strangers to this land, who had clearly traveled a long way. The hunters brought her to their temple, dedicated her, and raised her as a member of the Tribes of the Last Sun, known to many as the Rakkor.

Like all of the Solari faith, she underwent rigorous physical and religious training. However, unlike others, Diana was determined to understand why the Solari act the way they do, and the reasoning behind their beliefs. She spent her evenings digging through the libraries, devouring texts with only pale moonlight to read by. Paradoxically, this pursuit provided more questions than answers, and her teachers’ aphoristic replies did little to sate her inquisitive mind.

When Diana began to notice tomes had whole chapters torn from them, and all references to the moon seemed missing, the teachers assigned harsh punishments, intending to exhaust her into devotion. Likewise, her fellow acolytes distanced themselves from her and her questioning.

There was one shining beacon in these years of confused, frustrated isolation: Leona. The most devout of Diana’s peers, they often found themselves in impassioned debate. Though one never swayed the other in their long and frequent conversations, they developed a close friendship.

Then, one glorious night, Diana discovered a hidden alcove deep within the mountain. Moonlight spilled against its walls, revealing imagery of the sun, of soldiers armored in gold alongside silver-clad warriors, and matching imagery of the moon, atop Targon’s greatest peek. Delighted, Diana raced to share this clear message with Leona—the sun and moon were not enemies after all!

Leona did not react with joy.

She urged Diana to put this heresy from her mind entirely, warning of the punishments that may befall her if she were to voice such thoughts to others. Diana had never seen her serious friend quite so grave.

Frustration gnawed at her. She had reached the end of the Solari’s knowledge, yet not even Leona would take this new discovery into account. What were the Solari hiding? Increasingly, Diana felt certain there was only one place she could go for answers: the top of Mount Targon.

The climb tested her in every way imaginable, and time seemed to stand still as she scaled the peak. To survive, she focused her thoughts on her lone companion, and the answers that would make the Solari better, more whole.

The summit greeted her with the brightest, fullest moon she’d ever seen. After a rapturous moment, a pillar of moonlight slammed into her and she felt a presence taking hold of her, sharing glimpses of the past, and of another Rakkor faith called the Lunari. Diana realized this presence could only be one of the legendary Aspects… and she had been chosen as its host.

When the light dissipated, her mind was again her own. Diana found herself clad in armor, holding a crescent blade, and hair once dark hair now gleaming silver. She turned to find she was not alone—Leona stood at her side, similarly bedecked in shining, golden battleplate, a sunbreak-bright shield and sword in her hands.

Diana was overjoyed to share in this revelatory moment with her friend, but Leona thought only of returning to the Solari. Diana begged her not to, desperate that they face this new future together. But Leona refused, and their disagreement quickly turned into a titanic battle, erupting with moonlight and sunfire.

Fearful of losing herself to the Aspect’s power, Diana ultimately fled down the mountain. But, vindicated in her search, she felt more certain than ever that she had been right to question the Solari’s teachings. It was time to confront them, and show the error of their ways.

Pushing past their Ra’Horak guardians, Diana burst into the chambers of the high priests. They listened with mounting horror as she told of what she had learned of the Lunari… and then they denounced her as a heretic, a blasphemer, and a peddler of false gods. Rage filled Diana, amplified by the Aspect within, and she embraced it in a terrible burst of moonlight. Startled, she fled the temple, leaving a trail of death in her wake.

Now, driven by half-remembered visions and glimpses of ancient knowledge, Diana clings to the only truths she knows for certain—that the Lunari and the Solari need not be foes, and that there is a greater purpose for her than to be a Solari acolyte of Mount Targon.

And though that destiny remains unclear, Diana will seek it out, whatever the cost.

Run.

She raced as fast as she could, bloodied feet pounding the earth beneath her. She tore through another thick bramble. More thorns tugging at her ragged clothes. More scratches. More blood. More pain.

Her lungs burned. She gasped for breath, begged for rest, but the voice inside demanded more.

Run.

She fled just yesterday afternoon, but so much had happened since. First she heard the faculty staff, screaming for her from the conservatory grounds. Then the dogs, barking as she scrambled along the banks of the River Gren.

Night came, and with it, the distant sound of riders, thundering through the dark. She had lost her satchel there, along with the meager pickings she'd stolen from the kitchens of the Ravenbloom Conservatory—two apples, a torn heel of bread, and half a block of cheese that smelled like it had come all the way from Nockmirch. Enough to get her to safety, but barely. Gods, how the hunger gnawed. She picked berries, chewed on twigs, drank the rainwater from leaves.

There was so little peace. Every moment she paused, every time she allowed the exhaustion to weigh down on her, the voice inside would speak again.

Run.

She fell, tripped by a protruding root, landing heavy enough for something in her to crack. Through gritted teeth, she screamed. The pain lanced through her leg, up her body, then slowly, with each passing throb, melded with the rest. Everything ached. Everything burned.

For a time, she just lay there, her face in the mud. Night rain fell on her broken body, washing away her tears, and the blood.

Run, the voice said, angrier now.

Finally, she responded. "I can't!" she cried, her voice ragged as the rest of her. "I can't!"

The voice quietened.

Time passed. Exhaustion and pain braided together, and sent her to sleep.

In her dreams, she saw flashes of what had come before. Headmistress Telsi standing in her dormitory room, the Arbiter of Thorns beside her. "You have been chosen," Telsi said. “The war in Ionia requires new weapons. Old weapons.”

The Arbiter's rough hands on her temples. Flashes of fire in her vision.

The fever. The heat. The voice.

The voice.

Wake.

She woke with a start and lurched to the side, searching for danger. The rain had stopped, and a calm silence had fallen over the woods, broken only by the wind whistling through the trees, and the distant hooting of an owl.

No danger. At least, not for now.

Slowly, with weary arms, she lifted herself, then turned onto her back. Her knee cracked again, sending agony through the whole leg. She held the scream at bay until the pain faded to its old dull throb.

She gazed up past the swaying branches above, seeing stars through the clouds. Memories of happier times floated by. She remembered laying in the Fensworth fields with her grandmother as they named the constellations above. The Fox. The Liar. The Hope. Above her now, shining bright, was the Witch—her favorite. Emotion welled inside her. She let out a single sob, which steamed against the winter chill.

Cold. Cold! She hadn't noticed, but the chill had numbed her fingers and feet. She was freezing. She sat up fast and hugged herself, wiping the wet mud from her body as best she could. She breathed faster, panic setting in. The shivering started.

The voice spoke again. A new word.

Fire.

She limped from tree to tree in the darkness, searching for dry branches and leaves, anything she could burn. But the earlier rain had blanketed the woods, and left everything sodden.

The shivering had stopped. Her pain had faded. She was about ready to give in and let the cold take her, when ahead, in a small clearing, her eyes caught the moonlight gleaming off the slick stump of a large, felled tree. She narrowed her focus, looked closer, and spotted a deep notch carved into its surface.

Her heart soared. "A waytree… A waytree!"

Such trees had been a common sight in her youth. Dotted throughout the woodlands, they were used as markers by the empire’s scouts, and housed preserved food and other camping supplies. Slowly, she limped forward, every step an agony, until she reached the stump. She fumbled inside its hollow, hoping to find something, anything, that might help her.

There! Her frozen fingers clutched something thin and brittle. Kindling. She pulled out a bundle of sticks, tied neatly with twine. Inside was more—flint, emberleaves, dried beef, and a handful of wild mushrooms.

Soon enough, the fire was built. She sat by its sputtering infancy, hugging her knees and chewing absently on the beef. It was old and barely edible, but she didn't care. With the threat of imminent danger easing, she allowed herself a moment to think back.

Headmistress Telsi must be furious, she thought, as she stared into the blossoming flames. The old lady was a stern and brittle thing, with a lined and haggard face that would fall into a scowl more easily than a smile. She would have locked the conservatory down by now, and sent both scouting contingents out to search for her.

"Oh, Fynn," she sighed.

He was the conservatory's First Scout, a gentle man with kind eyes who found people like her—gifted people—and offered them a home. He had arrived at her grandmother's cottage just a few weeks after her passing, when the other villagers had all but exiled her. While the empire at large saw the value of mages, some of the more remote settlements like Fensworth still clung to old mistrusts. Witch, they called her. Witch. She remembered all those hateful eyes. She remembered begging for help. All the doors closed before her. The loneliness.

And then, one summer's day, Fynn Retrick had arrived to offer her something beautiful: hope.

She kicked the fire with her good leg. The wood cracked and the flames danced out again, warming her face. She gazed into the flickering light once more, deep in thought.

Surely, Fynn couldn't have known what Telsi would do. He was so kind to me. He was so—

She paused, noticing something odd before her. The fire seemed to be taking shape, creating a faint outline for a moment before collapsing away to nothing. She frowned, watching on as it happened again, then again. The same shape, the same collapse.

She glanced up, higher in the fire, and noticed two dark holes in the burgeoning blaze. They remained still and black as the night, no matter how bright the flames around them burned. She looked closer. No, not holes, she realized.

They were eyes.

Amoline.

She froze at the mention of her own name. The flames licked up, but the eyes held firm, fixed on her. She stared back, her skin crawling.

"What… What is this?" Amoline asked, her voice wavering. But she knew. She remembered what Headmistress Telsi had called it. The Gift. Something that would make Amoline stronger, something that would make her more than just a mage.

"You are a queen," Telsi had told her, "and it is your crown."

Amoline.

The voice grew with the flames. It rattled inside her, shaking her bones.

Witness.

The fire began shifting, creating shapes and patterns that put her in mind of events she’d never seen before.

There. A stone cathedral, tall and magnificent. At its entrance, an armored titan made war, scattering the desperate mortal fighters before him with a heavy and cruel mace. By his side were two fearsome beasts—one made of shadow, the other of fire.

Witness.

Amoline felt herself drawn toward the second beast. She peered closer. It was huge, with too-many broad, burning arms and a pulsating frame. It screamed ahead, bellowing out rage that twisted and withered its enemies in unholy fire.

The flames flared before Amoline. A pale woman smiled. At her feet lay the metal titan, destroyed. The two beasts that served him were beaten, forced back. Robed figures surrounded them, chanting in a tongue unknown to her. How the two raged. Amoline saw them falter. She saw their strength sapped until their power was whittled down into two droplets, small as rain.

Amoline followed the droplet of raging fire, trapped now inside a small warded vial. Days, months, years passed. It lay untouched, locked away. Dwindling. Desperate. The spirit ebbed. The light began to wane. Its roars fell to wails.

Amoline felt something unexpected well inside her. It was pity.

The flames flared again. She saw the Arbiter of Thorns, riding silently in a carriage. Ahead stood the great Ravenbloom Conservatory. The droplet of fire fell from its cage onto a bare forehead.

Then screaming, shackles, and fire.

Fire.

"Stop!" a voice cried out, and Amoline snapped from her trance.

The two black eyes blazed with fury mere inches from her face. She felt something below. Heat. Amoline looked down to see she was standing in the fire pit, flames lapping at her ankles. Just as the pain began to set in, just as she opened her mouth to scream, a cloaked figure crashed into her side, knocking her clear.

She slammed into the mud, coughing smoke and embers from the fire. The figure picked himself up, breathing hard.

"Gods, woman," he gasped, "what were you doing?"

Amoline turned away, smoke still burning her throat. She lay there, coughing and despondent, until the needles in her lungs calmed. Finally, she spoke. "I can't go back," she said, her voice feeble and hoarse. “You don’t know what she did to me.”

She felt his hand on her shoulder. "Who?"

"Headmistress Telsi," Amoline replied. She squeezed her eyes shut, expecting to feel steel restraints closing around her wrists once more.

"Who?" he repeated, and this time the confusion was ripe in his voice.

Amoline turned to find a slight man peering at her in the gloom, his eyes full of worry. He was a stranger to her—and, evidently, she to him.

"Who are you?" she asked.

The man turned and sat on the fallen tree beside him. "I am Gregori," he started, calm as he could muster, "just a simple traveler bound for the frontier. Nothing more." He studied her for a moment. "And you?"

"Amoline."

"Are you hurt, Amoline?"

She checked her legs. The charred soles of her boots had taken the brunt of the heat, and her laces had been lost to the fire. She pulled at the scorched leather to examine her feet… and found them unhurt, save for the blisters and bruises she earned while fleeing the conservatory.

She frowned.

"Just my knee," she murmured, pushing the ruined boots aside, "but not from…"

She looked over to where the fire had burned, and saw the wood scattered by the fall. The pit was little more than smoke and embers now, glowing impotently as the sunrise approached.

Amoline looked for the dark eyes, and found nothing.

"Well, between that and your bare feet, that’s two reasons not to travel on foot, hmm?" Gregori said. He eyed Amoline carefully, suspicious. But in the fledgling dawn light, he saw only a young and desperate woman. "My cart is just a short way there," he said, pointing through the trees, "I could take you to the nearest town. The healers there could—"

"No." Amoline was quick with her refusal. Towns were too dangerous, especially here. Telsi's scouts would be waiting.

"Well, I won't leave you like this."

She looked over Gregori again, searching for a badge or a pin or a pattern somewhere on his clothes that resembled the Ravenbloom sigil. Nothing. "You should," she said.

Gregori nodded slowly. "Would you like to eat, at least? I've a meat pie on my wagon, fresh from the baker’s oven, two villages back."

Amoline fell silent for a moment, trying to fend off the grumbling in her stomach. She failed.

"Yes," she admitted, "I would."

By the time the pair had finished their meal, dawn had fully broken and a frigid winter sun had broken through the crooked treeline. Alongside the pie, Gregori had shared a cold flagon of cow's milk and handful of sweetened chestnuts. Afterward, he joined Amoline on the stump of the waytree, and sketched a misshapen map of Noxus into the mud before pointing out all the places he'd already visited on his travels. Amoline watched on, quietly. This man, Gregori the Gray, was a lively and spirited fellow. His tale about the drunken Basilich krug-whisperers even brought a shadow of a smile to her face, although it was faint and fleeting.

His stories complete, silence fell on their small camp. Gregori leaned back and glanced over to the ruined fire pit. "Would you tell me what happened?" he asked, soft as a leaf.

Amoline pursed her lips.

"Show me where you're going," she demanded, ignoring his question and toeing the dirt map instead. Gregori nodded. He reached over with his charred stick and tapped the edge of the sketch.

"There," he said. "Over the mountains. As north as north gets."

"What's there?"

Gregori shrugged. "Nothing. Plains, valleys. I hope to make a home there." He looked over. "And you? Where will the winds take you?"

Amoline bowed her head, deep in thought. She'd thought of both Drugne and even somewhere in distant Tokugol—but now, in the clear light of day, both seemed so close, so obvious. She couldn't trust her old neighbors in Fensworth, and heading south to the capital would only tempt fate. Amoline thought back to a phrase she often heard the others whisper at the conservatory.

The Rose is everywhere, the Rose is everyone.

No. She would have to go somewhere new. Somewhere unexplored.

"Would..." she started, staring into the mud. "Would you take me with you?"

Gregori fell silent. Amoline slowly turned to see him looking at her, his eyebrows raised.

"I could leave once we neared the border," she continued, "I won't be any trouble. I can hunt and cook. I can—"

Gregori held his hand up, laughing softly. "I will take you as far as you please, Amoline, on one condition." Amoline waited as he leaned over. "It's a long way to the north. Will you tell me some stories of your own?"

"You won't like my stories, Gregori the Gray," she sighed.

"Maybe not, but I would still like to hear them."

By noon, Gregori had mounted his horse and resumed his journey, with Amoline hiding between sacks of food and loose lumber in the cart behind. The cart's rocking, the blanket's warmth, and her own exhaustion soon had the soft pull of sleep tugging at her spirit once more.

Darkness took her, and in her sleep, she finally dared to dream of a quiet and peaceful land far away from all who would hope to hurt her.

It was the stench of Bloodharbor that hit you first.

Like a gut-punch that took the wind right out of your sails.

The stink always got inside you, making you feel like you’d never get it out.

A noisome reek of opened leviathan bellies, dripping entrails you could crawl through, and weeks-old offal sticking to the cobbles like gory mortar left to rot in the sun. Mix that with the shit of ten thousand scavenging seabirds and the piss of the Slaughter Docks’ bloodied workers, and it was a smell strong enough to turn even the strongest stomach inside out.

You could wear a bandanna soaked in enough rum to souse the Bearded Lady herself, and it’d still get you.

Yes, it was awful, but Sarah Fortune loved what it represented.

It was the smell of prosperity, of a plentiful catch, and monster bounties earned.

A red tide meant people with coins in their pockets, ready to spend them all in the quayside taverns, gambling dens, and fleshpots, all of which paid a cut of their takings to Sarah.

Prosperity, yes—by the Bearded Lady, it was just the worst smell in the world.

Her small landing boat eased out into the sludgy water, its passage through the deepening evening lit by a storm lantern swaying from a wrought-iron tentacle at its bow.

Seated in the back of the boat, Sarah draped her hand over the gunwale and let her fingertips carve a path through the fatty layers on the water’s surface, drawing undulant spirals that rose and fell with the red tide.

“Even for you, that’s pretty damn reckless,” grunted Rafen, sweating as he leaned back and forth on the oars. Rafen was an old salt of the islands, with a craggy face weathered by ocean spray and hard winds, and a keen mind the rum hadn’t managed to take the edge off. He was, by turns, her conscience and right-hand man, and had seen pretty much every dark nook and cranny Bilgewater had to offer.

“How so?” asked Sarah.

“There’s ripper fish and flaying lampreys lurking just under the surface.”

“Scared I’ll get my fingers bitten off?” replied Sarah.

“Can’t pull a trigger without your fingers.”

“You worry too much, Rafen.”

“That’s my job, to worry about the things you don’t worry enough about.”

“Like this boat ride out to the Moon Serpent?”

“Exactly,” said Rafen. “I have a saying, and it ain’t steered me wrong none since I heard it at my papa’s knee. If it smells bad, leave it damn well alone, you idiot!”

Sarah shrugged. “Pretty much everything smells bad out here.”

“Maybe so, but that don’t change the truth of it,” said Rafen, glancing over his shoulder into the mist rising up from the water, where the Moon Serpent lurked like a dark secret. “The sea has an evil cast to it this night. Feels like hungry eyes are looking up from the deep.”

“Your bones talking to you again?”

“You mock, but I been listening to ’em for more’n forty years now, and I’m still alive, ain’t I?”

“Let it go, old man,” said Miss Fortune. “It’s a Captain’s Requiem, I have to be there. And if I have to be there in this ridiculous getup, then my second in command has to be there too.”

Said ridiculous getup consisted of a—literally—breathtaking whalebone corset of cobalt blue and golden lace beneath a gloriously long-tailed scarlet frock coat. In addition, she wore linen breeches of pale cream tucked into heeled boots of polished black leather with silver kraken buckles running from ankle to knee.

An absurdly impractical outfit, but in a gathering of captains it didn’t do to look anything less than obscenely wealthy. A poor captain was a weak captain, and like every kind of predator, Bilgewater reavers would ruthlessly prey on the weak.

Rafen hadn’t escaped the need to smarten up, either, and—under duress and threat of a demotion—wore a borrowed suit of sealskin leather, a scaled waistcoat whose buttons threatened to split from the fabric with every pull of the oars, and a stovepipe hat with a pressed tentacle headband.

“I might have to be there, but that don’t mean I got to like it,” said Rafen.

“True, but I need you to watch my back,” said Sarah. “Aligh had a large crew, and with him dead every captain will be circling like a wharf rat in heat. Last thing I need is his old crew going over to a rival captain or falling in with the likes of the Jackdaws or Butcher Blades.”

“Aye, there’s that,” begrudged Rafen. “Lot of powerful captains’ll likely be here to see Aligh off to the Bearded Lady, but do you really trust all of them to abide by the Truce?”

“Not even a little bit,” said Sarah, opening her coat to reveal a pair of exquisite ivory-handled pistols holstered under each armpit. “But it’s not like I’m going in unarmed.”

“They’ll take those off you, sure as eggs is eggs.”

“Please, you think they’re the only weapons I have?” she said, tapping the side of her head.

“Fair enough, but this still feels like a risk.”

“It surely is, but what’s life without a little risk?”

“I’ll remind you of that if this all goes under fast.”

Sarah grinned. “If it does, I promise you can haunt me from our watery grave.”

Rafen made a quick sign of the horns over his heart and shook his head, but returned his effort to rowing. He’d made his point, and Sarah had made sure he knew better than to press her when her mind was made up. Besides, she knew he was right, and there was nothing more irritating than a man who believed he was right.

But in deference to Rafen’s words, Sarah lifted her hand from the surface of the water and flicked the scum from her fingertips. Something toothy broke the surface where it landed and the old man raised his eyes in a told ya fashion.

Behind her, the ramshackle crags of Bilgewater shimmered in the fog, flickering anthills where people—her people—lived upon the flotsam and jetsam the ocean provided. Its structures clung to the rocks and mountains of the island chain like persistent barnacles that neither storm, Harrowing, nor the occasional probes of Noxian war-barques could ever entirely dislodge.

Like Sarah Fortune, Bilgewater was a survivor.

Since Gangplank’s death, she’d fought the unquiet spirits of the Shadow Isles and survived countless attempts on her life. Consolidating her rule over Bilgewater had been a messy, bloody affair, and her grip was still as shaky as an apprentice rigger on their first climb of the ropes. But she was still alive despite the venom—and firearms—aimed at her for putting her head above the parapet.

“Ship ahoy,” said Rafen.

Sarah looked past him to see a looming shape emerging from the rising mist.

Much like its former captain, the Moon Serpent was an old, unsubtle ship; broad in the beam and glowing with the dim light of dozens of hooded lanterns hanging from its many masts. The brigantine’s reinforced timbers were thickly caulked and carved with scales like a snake. Crusted salt in the grooves shone silver in the moonlight, and though its sails were still furled, Sarah knew they were woven from shimmering white cloth that must have cost Aligh a small fortune. Its ramming prow figurehead was a fanged serpent forged from the melted-down cannons of his enemies.

“By the Bearded Lady, I always forget how big it is…”

“She’s a beast sure enough,” said Rafen as the brigantine’s cold shadow fell across them.

“How in the world did a tight-fisted miser like Aligh pay for this?” said Sarah. “That cheapskate bastard never paid a kraken if he could spend a sprat. I heard he skipped out on his dues to the ocean, never so much as a drop of rum or a copper coin for the lords and ladies of the deep.”

“And ain’t that yet another reason for me to turn us around and not set foot on its deck,” said Rafen. “If even a bit of that’s true, then this here’s a doomed ship. The ocean needs its due, any captain worthy of the name knows that.”

“I gave a hex-carbine to the waters off White Wharf after claiming Jakmunt Zyglos’s bounty.”

“I remember,” said Rafen with a resigned shake of his head. “You promised that weapon to me.”

“Decent craftsmanship too. Wasn’t a Fortune Manstopper, but it was pretty nice.”

“Now you’re just being cruel.”

“A queen must be cruel only to be kind,” said Sarah with mock affectation, as Rafen eased the boat up to half a dozen others moored beneath a wide cargo net strung from the gunwale. The glossy hull of the Moon Serpent rose up like a black cliff and dark silhouettes moved through the lamplight high above.

“She’s sitting high in the water for such a big ship,” said Rafen, nodding toward the mottled green tide lines on the ship’s black hull as he tied the boat up with a loose slipknot.

“Her holds will be empty and most of the crew will be ashore getting three sheets to the wind on whatever cheap rotgut Aligh left them for his wake,” said Sarah.

“Lucky them,” said Rafen, pulling the oars in from the rowlocks and securing them along the gunwale. “You sure about this?”

Sarah rose and took hold of the cargo net, tipping her head back.

“Not really,” she said. “But when given the choice of going forward or back, a strong woman once told me that it’s always better to go forward, so let’s go.”

Hand over hand, Sarah and Rafen climbed to the Moon Serpent’s deck.

A pair of unsmiling twins in leather breeches and scaled shirts took Sarah’s guns and Rafen’s marlinspike dagger as soon as they clambered over the gunwale. Both women were heavily muscled and angrily sober, no doubt wishing they were ashore partaking in Aligh’s wake-rum instead of forming a skeleton crew for a bunch of captains who would, like as not, dance a jig to see one another dead.

One of the twins wore a helmet made from the skull of a scuttle-crab and matching patchwork armor of boiled shells, while the other had a face covered with tattoos of unblinking eyes. When the latter grinned at the sight of the gun-dame forged pistols, Sarah saw her mouth was filled with teeth prized from a razorscale’s jawbone.

Sarah followed them as they made their way to the raised foredeck, and marked which of the three chests they put the confiscated weapons into—cannonball dent in the right side.

An enormous bronze cannon sat on a carved ebony gun carriage just in front of the chests. The weapon’s flared muzzle was sealed with wax, and the sail-shrouded body of Captain Aligh would be entombed within, pickled in rum, vinegar, and camphor for its journey to the bottom of the sea.

“Shame to send something so beautiful to the deep,” said Sarah. “The cannon, I mean.”

“Aye,” agreed Rafen. “A finer thirty pounder I’ve yet to see, but it’s tradition, and you don’t go messing with traditions, right?”

“Right…” said Sarah, turning her attention to the broad-shouldered figure standing immobile next to the ship-wrecker. “Lady help us if we ever buck tradition, eh?”

He was swathed in a robe of iridescent scales with a wide-mouthed fish-head hood ringed in razor teeth. He carried a tentacle-wrapped billhook, and Sarah immediately knew him for what he was.

“A rare honor to have a serpent caller at a Captain’s Requiem,” she said.

“Amazing what enough gold krakens can buy you, eh?” replied Rafen.

Within the jagged hood, the serpent caller wore a mask of perforated coral over the lower half of his face, while his eyes and forehead were obscured by a dried-out squid’s body with crudely cut eye-holes through which the priest surveyed the gathered captains.

The wide deck was thronged with a host of Bilgewater reavers in all their finery: long coats, polished boots, tall hats, and archaic pieces of armor that would drag them straight to the ocean floor if they fell overboard. Sarah saw a wealth of gold and silver sigils and medals, Buhru fishhook amulets, and lucky talismans to honor the lords and ladies of the deeps.

Some captains she knew from fighting or drinking—often both—and some she knew only by reputation.

They, of course, all knew her.

With her blood-red hair, creamy skin, and confident swagger, Sarah Fortune would be a hard woman to miss in any circumstance, but on this ship she was a wild rose among poisoned thorns.

“Quite the gathering, eh?” said Rafen.

“Nothing like death to really bring people together,” said Sarah.

Rafen nodded and said, “Now I know how a fat waverider feels when it finds itself surrounded by a pack of hungry longtooths.”

Sarah shook her head. “You have it backward, old man. I’m the longtooth here.”

Rafen didn’t reply as Sarah marched to the ship’s centerline and back, adjusting each stride for the motion of the ship’s deck. Just as every pistol had its own unique character, so too did every ship; its own way to crest the tides and heed the wind. She moved with the anchored ship’s roll and sway, letting the creak and groan of seasoned timbers tell their secrets from her boots on up.

“A shallow-riding wallower,” she said. “Surprising for such a wide-beamed vessel.”

“I like ’em broad in the beam,” said Rafen, instinctively adjusting the width of his stance.

“So I heard.”

“Not as nimble as a cutter,” said Rafen, ignoring her jibe, “but I’ll wager a bottle of Myron’s Dark she’ll hold you tight to her bosom in rough seas.”

“That she will, Rafen,” said a slender woman dressed in a long coat of pale blue, with gold edging at the cuffs and bronze fringed epaulettes. “She’s a grand old dame, right sure. Sank Darkwill’s Glory and even poked a few holes in the Red Noxtoraa before the Mudtown fogs closed in and saved its cursed hide.”

A salt-stiffened bicorn flopped at a rakish angle on the woman’s shaven head, and the state of her eyes—two poached eggs wobbling in a bowl of fish soup—told Sarah she’d been hitting the rum hard already. Her skin had the waxy, yellowish complexion of someone only recently returned from a long sea voyage.

“Captain Blaxton,” said Rafen. “I heard you were dead.”

“Rumors of my death fly around Bilgewater with every sunset,” said the woman. “And with them, men weep, and their wives curse the morn of their disproving. I assure you, I am in the rudest of health.”

She turned to Sarah and gave her an elaborate bow before offering her a hand.

Sarah took it and was instantly on guard. Despite Blaxton’s drunken appearance and feather-light grip, she felt hard-earned calluses and powder burn ridges on the heel of her palm.

“Marla Blaxton, at your service, Captain Fortune,” she said, releasing Sarah’s hand. “Recently returned from a year of raiding the Amarantine Coast, where the sea is clear, the sky blue, and the coastal settlements fat with more gold than a captain could spend in ten lifetimes.”

“How wonderful,” said Sarah. “Why would you ever choose to return from that?”

“Good times can only last so long, you know. The inhabitants of said settlements had some strange ideas about ‘ownership’ and ‘not being dead’. Also, they were able to summon some curious mage-types who turned the sea and sky against me in ways I’d never seen before.”

“Ah, so you lost all your ships,” said Rafen.

“A few,” allowed Blaxton, waving her hand dismissively. “A temporary setback, Rafen. One from which I expect to bounce back any day now.”

“Perhaps with a new crew and a shallow-riding wallower of a brigantine?” suggested Sarah.

Blaxton laughed and said, “Anything is possible,” before giving her another bow and rejoining a group of captains gathered around a leaking barrel of rum by the foremast.

And Sarah’s heart skipped a beat as she saw a face she recognised, an enemy face.

Rafen saw him too and gripped her arm.

“Remember the Truce,” he hissed urgently.

Sarah didn’t answer, too focused on the man before her.

She pulled her arm free and strode toward him, keeping her face expressionless.

Blond hair, tied back in a rough ponytail, a loose strand hanging, just so, over his handsome, clean-shaven features. He looked up and met her gaze, the ice in his eyes frosting at her approach.

“Sarah,” he said, opening his arms to her. “Look, I know we—”

She didn’t let him finish, hammering her fist into his gut without breaking stride.

He buckled like he’d been hit by one of the twenty-four pounder balls, and his handsome face met her rising knee with a sickening crunch of bone.

He flew back and Sarah pounced on him before he could rise, straddling him and reaching for her pistol before remembering it was locked in a chest next to the mainmast.

Cannonball dent in the right side.

Instead of shooting him, she hauled his head up by his collar and cocked her fist back for another punch. He coughed blood, and lifted a forge-crafted hand of whirring bronze cogs, leather straps, and clicking mechanics out in front him.

“Please,” he wheezed through a broken nose and a mouthful of blood.

“Hello, Petyr,” she said. “I told you what would happen if I saw you again, didn’t I?”

Captain Petyr Harker.

The last time she’d seen him, he’d been cradling the splintered, bloody ruin of his hand, the hand he’d always boasted killed the Crimson Blade.

Petyr, along with Captains Crow and Bragg, had conspired to strip her of her hard-won gains in the wake of her killing Gangplank. Both Crow and Bragg were now dead, one from a pistol ball to the head, the other with one lodged in his liver.

Her pistol balls.

Walking out of the gunfight at MacGregan’s Killhouse, she’d promised to take more than Petyr’s other hand if she ever saw him again.

The Truce of the Sinking Soul was a long-standing tradition in Bilgewater.

More of an unwritten rule than a strictly enforced custom, but it allowed rival crews to gather without bloodshed when their captains attended the all too frequent funerals of old sea-legends.

That violent men and women would abide by such an archaic custom always struck Sarah as somewhat quaint, and until now she’d always kept it in the if it ain’t broken… part of her mind.

An iron grip seized her right elbow and pulled her clenched fist back.

Rafen appeared on her left, dragging her off Petyr.

“Easy, captain,” he said. “Easy now…”

Part of her wanted to land another punch, but by the time Rafen had her back on her feet, the anger had gone out of Sarah. She’d made her point, and so let herself be pulled away.

“Upon our last descent,” said a rum-sodden voice in her ear. “All gathered heed this oath.”

“Peace be upon us all,” she repeated automatically. “No harm to body or soul.”

“No shot nor blade, no serpent nor spell,” added Rafen.

“Observe the Truce of the Sinking Soul!” finished Petyr, scrambling away from her.

Sarah let out a long breath, and turned to see who, along with Rafen, had pulled her off.

A hunched wretch in an expensive kraken-skin coat, fresh octopus-tentacle tie, and glistening stingray flat-cap that was well above the tattered sackcloth she normally saw him wearing.

“Thorne?” she said, shrugging off Rafen’s touch.

“It’s Captain Thorne these days,” he said, spitting a wad of expensive dried-seaweed tobacco to the deck and missing the polished toe of her boot by a finger’s breadth.

Sarah laughed. “You? A captain? Since when?”

Thorne preened, looking like a powder monkey with a freshly stolen mango. “Got me a ship now, and a crew of hearty sea-rats off the back of what you done to Crow and Bragg.”

His breath was like a bucket of rotten clams. Thorne could parade in expensive clothes, but he could never change who he truly was.

“You always were a bottom feeder, weren’t you?” said Sarah. “Now get out of my way.”

Thorne stood aside, and said, “Mark my words, Sarah Fortune, you’ll get what’s comin’ to ya.”

“Promises, promises,” said Sarah, and in two quick steps she was standing over Petyr Harker.

She held her arm out and rippled her fingers, like she was flipping a coin along her knuckles.

“Can I give you a hand?” she said with a grin.

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“It is funny,” said Sarah. “Look how I’m smiling.”

Petyr looked at her gloved hand through an eye that was already swollen and purple. Despite the obvious pain of his bleeding nose and winded gut, he grinned.

“If I give you my good hand, are you going to shoot it off?” he asked.

“I’m not planning to, but the day’s yet young.”

He took her hand, and Sarah hauled him to his feet.

“Why are you here, Petyr?” she asked.

“There might not be a Corsair’s Conclave anymore, but traditions need to be upheld, yes?”

“So I keep hearing,” said Sarah, glancing at Rafen.

She pulled a handkerchief from her coat and handed it to Petyr. He nodded gratefully and wiped the blood from his lips and chin before handing it back.

“Keep it,” she said, then nodded admiringly at his new hand. “Nice work. Doesn’t look like Bilgewater craft.”

“It’s not,” said Petyr. “Well, it is and it isn’t. A new apprentice down at Bitterbelt’s forge made it for me. Zaunite lad named Gysbert.”

“Looks expensive.”

“It was.”

Sarah looked him up and down, taking in his tailored clothing, the well-fed cheeks, and the empty scabbard that looked like it might hold a fine blade. Whatever had become of Petyr after losing his hand, he’d clearly bounced back well enough.

“I keep wondering if I should have killed you back at MacGregan’s,” said Sarah.

“I’ve often wondered why you let me live,” said Petyr. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you didn’t kill me, but let’s be honest, I’m just the sort of fellow to seek dramatic revenge in some stupidly elaborate scheme.”

Despite herself, Sarah laughed. “That you are, Petyr, that you are. But if you want the truth, I didn’t kill you because killing you would have been Gangplank’s way of doing things, and I always try to be better than he was.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“It’s a work in progress,” admitted Sarah as Rafen stepped between them, holding tin mugs hooked over his fingers in one hand, and a large bottle of rum in the other.

“Here,” he said. “If the Truce is holding, and we’re not going to start killing each other, then we might as well have a swig of Aligh’s rum, eh?”

Sarah passed a mug to Petyr before taking one for herself as Rafen poured them all two fingers of the syrupy brown liquid.

“Keep your powder dry and your cutlass sharp,” said Rafen.

“And the world will turn,” finished Sarah, and the three of them touched mugs.

Sarah tipped her head back and took a mouthful, wincing at the gritty, overly sweet taste.

“Oh, that’s bad. That’s really bad,” she said. “You sure they didn’t put Aligh’s body in the rum barrel instead of the cannon barrel?”

“Aligh was known for many things—being a cruel old bastard, a ruthless captain, and a seasoned killer—but one thing he wasn’t known for was his largesse in vittles,” said Petyr, pouring the remains of his rum onto the deck.

“I didn’t know you knew Aligh.”

Petyr shook his head vigorously. “I didn’t. I mean, I knew him by reputation, of course, but it’s not like I ever set foot on the Moon Serpent before today.”

“The man was an enigma,” said Thorne, sidling up to Rafen and holding out his own mug. “A regular man of mystery, but who cares about that? He’s dead, and we ain’t.”

Sarah shrugged and nodded to Rafen, who poured Thorne a generous measure.

“Aye,” continued Thorne. “There’s none here gathered who knows much of the man. They say he never came ashore neither. Always sent one of them vicious twins. So, did you hear how he died?”

“I heard he was stabbed in his sleep by a cabin boy who’d taken one too many beatings,” said Captain Blaxton, arriving mug in hand.

Rafen duly poured her a measure.

“May all your lookouts be sober,” she said, taking a drink. “Ah, some of the good stuff.”

“That’s what you heard?” said Sarah. “I heard he choked to death on a barb-squid that wasn’t quite dead in his dinner.”

Rafen shook his head. “No, that’s just what the cutters on the Slaughter Docks are saying. I heard it from one of the chandlers down the grottoes that he was so drunk he fell overboard. His pockets were so laden with gold that he sank all the way down, straight into the waiting grasp of the Bearded Lady.”

Instinctively, they all looked over the gunwale to the ocean far below.

The waters swirled around the ship, deep and black like a liquid mirror. She saw her wavering reflection, splintered by the water and lapping at the barnacled hull. Hard waves broke against the hull—the kind you saw when something large was coming up from below.

“Told you it had an evil cast to it tonight,” said Rafen.

Sarah let out a breath and tapped her left eye twice with her right thumb, an old sailor’s tradition to ward off evil influences.

“Ach, he was an old man, maybe he just died,” said Sarah. “That’s what old men do best.”

“Fog’s rolling in,” said Blaxton, nodding out to sea.

A chill passed through Sarah as she saw the fog was coming in from the southeast; cold, clammy, and freighted with the smell of the deepest ocean trenches.

“Don’t matter none how the old bastard died,” said Thorne. “All that matters is what happens to his ship and his crew. That’s why we’re all here, ain’t it? Every one of us wants to claim that big prize, don’t we?”

All four captains studied one another, each knowing that was exactly why they were here.

“No one ever found his serpent sigil, did they?” said Blaxton.

“His sigil?” scoffed Rafen. “Like as not, it’s sealed away in that cannon with him. Doesn’t matter anyway, no one pays any heed to a captain’s sigil these days.”

“Maybe they should,” said Sarah. “Maybe there’d be a lot less bloodshed if you could just claim a ship and crew with the previous captain’s sigil.”

“Scared of a little blood, are ya?” grinned Thorne. “Not got the stomach for it, eh?”

Sarah took a step toward him and said, “Truce or not, talk to me like that again and I’ll show you how much stomach I have for bloodshed.”

“Didn’t mean to go upsettin’ ya, Captain Fortune,” laughed Thorne, exposing black teeth and rotten gums. “Just wondering how many of ’em here gathered would have even the slightest hesitation of trying to claim Aligh’s crew if they could get their hands on that sigil…?”

Sarah looked past Thorne at the other captains gathered on the Moon Serpent’s deck, wondering the same thing. Most of them were small fry, with crews that were too green to make a serious play for Aligh’s ship, but the three drinking rum with her… Now that was a motley crew indeed, and any one of them might be a rival she needed to worry about sticking a knife in her back.

Before any of them could say anything in answer to Thorne’s question, Sarah felt the deck shift underfoot, a slow roll and dip.

She reached inside her coat and pulled out a silver coin, flicking it over the side of the ship.

Thorne watched it tumble end over end to the waters, and for a moment she wondered if he might dive in after it.

“Why’d ya do that?” he said. “This ain’t your ship.”

“Someone has to,” said Sarah, as the Moon Serpent’s white sails unfurled. “We’re getting underway.”

The ship sailed eastward out of Bilgewater Bay, taking a gently curving route to avoid the many jagged reefs, treacherous sandbanks, and jutting wrecks that could see a ship foundered. The fog Blaxton had spotted had fully enveloped them now, and the ship sailed in an almost dead silence, interrupted only by the occasional shout between the skeleton crew.

Despite the awfulness of the rum, Sarah, Rafen, Thorne, Petyr, and Blaxton worked their way through the rest of the bottle. After a couple of shots, the sweetness became bearable, and Sarah felt her mood loosening.

With the bottle empty, Rafen threw it overboard and Sarah sent him below deck to find another.

The Moon Serpent sailed onward, deeper into the fog.

More theories as to how Aligh had died were offered, each more ridiculous than the last, and Sarah found herself wiping tears of laughter from her eyes as Petyr finished a preposterous tale of Aligh falling afoul of the Trickster and being led out to sea in a golden narwhal costume only to be carved up by the Bloodharbor Ripper in a tragic case of mistaken identity.

A distant voice, muffled by the fog, called out from the crow’s nest.

“What did he say?” she asked, peering up through the rigging. She held on to the gunwale rail as her vision spun a tad. The rum was bad, but it was strong. Time to ease up.

“I think he said ‘Land ho!’ or possibly ‘Sand Lo!’” said Blaxton, bleary eyed from the rum.

Sarah blinked. “Sand Lo? Why would he say that?”

“I believe it’s a traditional Shuriman greeting,” giggled Petyr, taking another belt of rum.

Sarah fought the laughter bubbling up from her gut as she heard the clatter of iron chains spilling off the deck, swiftly followed by the heavy splash of an anchor hitting the water.

“We’re here,” said Thorne, spitting a viscous wad of tobacco into the sea.

Sarah peered through the mist, seeing a craggy spur of black rock rearing out of the water. Salt crystals glittered in the weak light of the stars.

“Moonshard Reef,” she said. “Why in the name of the Lady’s Beard are we here?”

“Aligh always claimed he was part Marai on his mother’s side,” said Petyr.

“Horse dung!” said Thorne. “The man’s never even seen a Marai, let alone been birthed from one.”

“Makes for an exotic tale though,” said Blaxton. “Mystic origins, magical blood, that sort of thing. Kind of backstory every captain wishes they had. Wish I’d thought of it.”

The thumping of wood on wood halted further discussions, and Sarah turned to see the serpent caller hammering the raised foredeck with his tentacle-wrapped billhook.

In his other hand, he held a flaming torch that burned with a brilliant silver light.

“The sea is this world’s cemetery, and its souls sleep best without monument,” said the serpent caller, his voice a grating hiss through the coral mask. “All other graveyards show symbols of distinction between great and small, rich and poor—but the king, the fool, the prince, and the peasant are all the same to the ocean. Now, fellow travelers of the Sea… heed my words, it is time to pay the ocean its due!”

“About damn time,” said Sarah. “Let’s get this done and go home.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Petyr.

Sarah and the other captains gathered before the wax-stoppered cannon as the serpent caller’s eyes swept over them all. She felt the potency of the rum swimming around her body, and saw a number of the other captains swaying with more than the motion of the ship.

Where in the eight seas is Rafen?

She didn’t want any more rum. She just wanted him here by her side.

The twins who’d met her and Rafen as they came aboard to confiscate their weapons worked a block and tackle over to the center of the deck. An enormous hook on a thick rope loop was lowered and secured to the lifting ring on the cannon just behind the oiled fuse.

“What a waste,” said Blaxton, tears streaming down her face.

“I didn’t realise you and Aligh were close,” said Sarah.

“What? Gods, no! I mean the cannon. That’s an Orban thirty pounder,” said Blaxton. “Probably one of only a handful left in existence. One hit from that would punch a hole clean through a Noxian warship from stem to stern. Crying shame to see it go to waste.”

Thanks to her mother’s teachings, Sarah knew more about pistols and rifles than she did about the intricacies of ship-borne weapons, but even she had to agree the bronze cannon was far too good for the likes of a miserly soul like Aligh. Was that a final insult to those left behind, that his most beautiful weapon would serve as his tomb and never belong to anyone else?

Something niggled about that, though—a nagging feeling she was missing something.

Crab Hat secured the hook to the cannon, then she and her twin stood back as the serpent caller began to speak.

“Captains of Bilgewater, it does my heart proud to see so many of you here today,” he said. “The best and the worst, the scum and the cream of our city’s reaver-kind.”

A few mutters went through the captains at so harsh an opening, but serpent callers were known to be touched by the Bearded Lady, and their ways were unknowable to most people.

“Our fair isles stand at a pivotal moment in their history, and many paths lead into the future, as tangled and inconstant as the many limbs of Nagakabouros, but I have seen the way forward! On many of these paths, I see the peaks and coves of the Serpent Isles ablaze, its people dying as our enemies close in. But on one path, one singular path, I see us proud, stronger than ever, a united people under a great leader!”

Sarah’s brow furrowed. Yes, the serpent callers were a strange bunch, but this was beyond anything she’d heard any of them say before.

“You have gathered here to see Captain Aligh down to the depths, a man whose boots none of you were fit to clean. A man of vision, a man who knew what needed to be done!”

The twins began hauling on the pulley ropes to lift the cannon, their muscles bunching and straining as the rear end of the cannon, gun carriage and all, began lifting from the deck. The barrel tilted downward, and were it not for the waxed stopper, Sarah felt she could have looked right down its length to see Aligh’s dead body.

“You all have failed Nagakabouros! You all have fought and betrayed one another, like Rat Town scum scrabbling over a copper sprat. None of you has the vision to raise a fleet like the ones of old and make Bilgewater ruler of the waves! You all throw your coins and your tributes into the water, and for what? For safety? A blessing? No, it’s a sacrifice you’re offering, a blood price for the ocean to lend you its wrath. But what does the ocean care for copper coins or the smallest fish of the catch? No, for Bilgewater to prosper, it needs a red tide of offerings!”

Sarah surreptitiously glanced around at the other captains to see what they were making of the serpent caller’s lunacy, but clearly the rum had numbed them to just how insane this was. She felt eyes upon her and saw Petyr looking right at her.

He gave her a terse smile, and her unease ratcheted up several notches.

She saw he was easing, half-step by half-step, toward the gunwale.

Sarah looked back down the cannon barrel.

And then she knew.

“Oh no…”

She ran toward the raised foredeck, tearing off her hat and reaching up to pull out twin stilettos masquerading as hairpins. Each was a slender needle of blackened steel with a rounded skull-pommel, and she knew just where to stick them to kill a man stone dead.

“So I offer the sea your blood, your sacrifice!” screamed the serpent caller, tearing off his mask and hood so everyone could see him. So everyone would know who had brought them here to die.

Sarah saw a grey-bearded face, furrowed by old age and aglow with madness. A long scar bisected his leathery face from right eyebrow to left cheek, and the wisps of his beard were twisted into thin braids entwined with pearls and fishhooks.

His eyes were the eyes of a man who never paid a kraken if he could spend a sprat.

Who skipped out on the ocean’s tithe on every voyage.

A man she knew from reputation and decades of bloody legend.

“Aligh, you treacherous bastard!” she yelled.

The twins saw her coming, but couldn’t yet release the chains holding the cannon’s rear aloft.

Time slowed for Sarah, her heartbeat like the slow tolling of the bell upon the Widow’s Manse whenever a ship was lost to the ocean. It felt like she was running knee deep in sticky guts in the carving bays of the Slaughter Docks.

“You’re too late, Captain Fortune,” said Aligh.

He swept the torch down to the back of the cannon, and roared in triumph.

She pulled back her hand to throw one of her stilettos.

She knew she wouldn’t make it.

The silver flame lit the oiled touchpaper.

And the world exploded in a deafening blast of fire and thunder.

That she wasn’t dead was Sarah’s first surprise.

Her second was that the Moon Serpent was still afloat.

A cannon that big ought to have holed the ship all the way down to the ocean, and broken its keel.

She couldn’t hear anything, not really. Her ears were filled with a high-pitched whine, maddeningly shrill and muffled at the same time.

She rolled onto her side, wincing as she felt blood streaming down her arm.

A dull awareness of foggy, distant sounds coming from behind made Sarah turn her head.

A scene of utter carnage, worse than anything she’d seen in a long time.

And suddenly she knew why the ship wasn’t sinking. The cannon had been primed with canister shot.

It was a load designed to shred and maim flesh, but leave a vessel intact, and it had worked its lethal power with horrifying potency.

Sarah’s mad dash toward Aligh had carried her mostly clear of the wide fan of red-hot fragments, but the other captains weren’t so lucky.

Men and women lay sprawled on a deck slick with blood.

Those closest to the gun were almost unrecognisable, transformed from living, breathing human beings into scraps of bloody meat. Shorn arms and legs lay scattered in gory heaps, and it was all but impossible to tell which limb belonged to which body.

But not everyone was dead.

Those captains toward the rear of the throng writhed in agony, bleeding from scores of deep lacerations and screaming the name of the Bearded Lady. Sarah could still barely hear them.

She saw Blaxton lying in a lake of blood, her fine blue coat cut to pieces, as if someone had given her a hundred lashes from a barbed cat-o’-nine-tails. Sarah couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive, but she was lying very still. Thorne slithered out from beneath her, and with the luck typical of that lowlife, it looked like he’d escaped the worst of the blast using Blaxton as a human shield.

Rafen! Where’s Rafen?

She couldn’t see him, and could only hope that he’d found a way to survive.

He must have, he’s Rafen. He survives everything, doesn’t he?

Then her eyes settled on a figure lying sprawled against the railings, bloodied, but mostly unhurt.

Petyr Harker.

He grinned, and hate filled Sarah as she knew that somehow, in some way, that smug, conniving sea-slug had known about Aligh’s trap. He had to have been part of setting it up, a glittering, silver-tongued lure for captains who didn’t know him well enough to send him packing.

Sarah saw the deck hatch swing open, and the skeleton crew that had sailed them out to Moonshard Reef emerged with long gutting knives to finish what their vile captain had begun. They moved as if in a languid dream, skewering bellies and cutting throats with sadistic relish.

Anger surged through Sarah, and she sat upright, blinking through tears of pain.

You’re alive, damn it! Do something!

With that thought blazing in her mind, sounds rushed back and her vision cleared.

The screams of the dying drove her to her feet, and she swept up her stilettos once again.

Aligh stood far behind the smoking cannon, arms aloft and surveying his bloody handiwork with the eyes of a zealot. Sarah sprinted toward him again, but this time the twins rushed past their captain to intercept her.

She vaulted over the cannon, and hammered her boots into the face of the twin with the tattooed eyes all across her skull. Razorscale teeth splintered under Sarah’s iron hard boot-heels, and sent the woman flying backward.

Sarah landed lightly and leapt to the side as Crab Hat swung a monstrous, fang-toothed club at her head. It smashed the deck boards to splinters, and Sarah rolled to her feet hammering her daggered fist into the woman’s back. The crab-shell armor was hard and smooth and the stiletto slid clear without penetrating.

The woman wrenched the club from the deck and spun around, the weapon slashing just over Sarah’s head. Her tattooed twin was back up, blood streaming down her face of many eyes, turning it into a hideous grimace. She held a pair of long punch daggers with razor-toothed sawfish blades.

She came at Sarah in a flurry of blows, elbows, and high kicks.

Sarah tried to parry and dodge, only barely avoiding each killing blow. She could hold her own in a fight, but she’d take a pistol over a pair of thin daggers any day. By the time they’d backed up toward the cannon, Sarah’s shirt was soaked in blood and she was seriously reconsidering the wisdom of her plan to fight hand to hand.

From the corner of her eye she saw the armored twin winding up for another strike.

Two to one, this fight would only end badly for Sarah.

Tattooed Eyes slashed her dagger low, and Sarah grunted as it cut a line of fire across the side of her thigh. She dropped to one knee as a reverse stroke came for her throat.

She lifted her arm to parry, and the slashing blade cut straight through the fabric of her coat.

The impact sent searing bolts of pain up Sarah’s arm, but the iron rods specially woven into the back of the sleeve halted the blade before it bit flesh.

Her foe let out a “Ha!” of triumph, but the grin fell from her face as she realised Sarah was unhurt.

“Gedian and Sons, Battle Tailors and War Clothiers,” said Sarah, and hammered her stiletto up through the soft flesh on the underside of her foe’s jaw. Her eyes flew wide in shock, and Sarah saw the black needle of the blade behind her razor teeth as it punched up into her brain.

Sarah rose and kicked the dead body away as her twin screamed in anguish.

Stiletto versus war-club—bad odds. Really bad odds.

Sarah risked a glance behind her.

Cannonball dent in the right side…

This was her chance to even those odds.

The armored twin launched herself at Sarah in fury, her huge, toothed club rising up for a strike. The weapon slashed down in an executioner’s arc, and Sarah dived aside at the last instant.

The iron head of the club smashed the chest behind Sarah apart. She spun inside the twin’s guard and drove her blade into a gap between the plates of crab-shell armor.

The woman grunted and stumbled backward, tearing the weapon from Sarah’s hand.

Sarah turned and began frantically searching through the shattered ruin of the chest, sweeping aside damaged knives, brass-knuckles, and iron-tipped cudgels.

“Come on, come on, where are you…?” she hissed, hearing the scrape of a club being lifted from the deck. A broken handle, a bent blade.

Had one of the twins hidden them somewhere else, hoping to keep them for themselves…?

No, no, no…

And then her palm closed on the smooth, ivory-handled grips she knew better than anything.

Sarah spun the twin pistols into her grip, and snapped the firing mechanism into place.

She twisted and dived to the side, pulling the triggers in a storm of shot.

Crab-shell armor was proof against blades and hooks, but against gun-dame-forged weapons, the tattooed woman might as well have been naked.

Red-hot pistol balls blasted through her armor, and she toppled over the cannon, leaking vital fluids from more than a dozen neat holes.

Sarah rose to her feet and tensed as she felt the roll and sway of the deck change. It was a subtle change, almost unnoticeable, a change in the angle of the anchored ship’s prow as the swell of the ocean shifted…

“Oh, now that’s not good…” she said, as Aligh limped toward her, distraught at the sight of the dead twins.

“You killed them!” he cried.

Sarah fired a shot into each of his kneecaps. “That’s for all the captains you killed tonight.”

Aligh screamed, writhing on the deck. He wept and feebly tried to swing his billhook at her.

Sarah easily batted it aside and jammed a pistol under his chin.

“Any last words?” she asked. “Now this really is your funeral.”

The deck shifted again, and a deathly silence fell over the ship.

Even the wounded seemed to recognize the strange quality of the darkness closing in around them as a deep rumbling sound rose up from the water.

Sarah sensed fearful tremors running through the ship’s timbers.

“What’s happening?” she demanded, jabbing the pistol harder into Aligh’s throat. “What else did you have planned tonight?”

“This is none of my doing,” wept Aligh, and despite his obvious agony, he laughed with the hysteria of a man who knew his time had come. “My bill to the sea is due. And you’re going to pay it with me…”

Sarah had felt something like this in the bones of a ship once before.

Nine years ago, just north of Bilgewater and making the last, hooking sprint to the inner bay. They’d been returning from a bounty run up by Drakkengate and spotted a smuggler running a slimmed-down carrack out of the Ironwater coves, fleeing the Serpent Isles with treasures looted from a Buhru temple.

She still remembered the mournful rumble of the titanic serpent horns as they echoed over the ocean, and the terror as her crew watched an abyssal kraken rear up from the water to smash the carrack to matchwood and drag all aboard to their deaths.

The shift in the deck as the kraken had passed under their ship felt just like this.

She ran to the gunwale and searched the fog and ocean.

The sea swirled around the crags of Moonshard Reef, dark and keeping their secrets. No one knew just how deep it got around here, but any ship that sank out this way was never seen again, never washed up on the isles.

What’s out there…?

And then she saw it.

Two hundred yards out, huge and unyielding, a titan rising from the deep.

The vast dome of its helmeted head broke the water, twin eyes glowing with the orange light of a smelting furnace. The water boiled around it, frothed to madness by a dark miasma surrounding its wavering outline, and leaving an oily slick in its wake.

Its body was huge, encased in plates of corroded iron, looped with chains torn from countless sunken vessels. Across one shoulder it carried a colossal, hook-bladed anchor, dripping with black water and garlanded with rotten weeds from the deepest, darkest abyss.

Sarah’s mind refused to process what she was seeing.

This is impossible.

It was a dark legend come to life, a scare story told around the beer-soaked tables of the wharf-side taverns by drunken rakes hoping for a free drink. She knew its name, had even laughed at the impossibility of its existence.

But here it was, rising from the ocean with booming, ponderous strides.

The drowned tallyman, come to claim the ocean’s due.

Even his name was said to be a curse.

“Nautilus…”

The water exploded as Nautilus hurled his anchor at the Moon Serpent.

A tidal wave made stagnant and rotten by its time in the darkness washed over the ship, as the anchor crashed into the deck. It smashed clear through the timbers, and the ship tilted wildly to port as the impossible weight of it pulled it over.

Sarah fell against the railing and jammed her pistols home in their shoulder holsters as the ship tilted downward. Crew screamed as they slid down the angled deck or were thrown overboard. The anchor ripped clear of the ship’s side, and the ship violently righted itself. Sarah looked up at the sound of splintering masts overhead. Silver sails billowed as the topmast and mizzen snapped like twigs, falling to the shattered deck to crush a dozen men or more.

She struggled to her feet, hearing the groan of a keel bending under stresses it had never been designed to endure. Caulked timbers split and geysers of black water erupted all along the length of the deck.

Sarah turned to Aligh, who clung to the bronze cannon that ought to have served as his tomb.

“You did this!” she yelled, as the looming shadow of Nautilus reared up from the water.

The carved wooden railing smashed to splinters as a massive hand, surely too large to have once been mortal, slammed down on the foredeck. Another swiftly followed, trailing a length of chain that slithered with a black, oily substance.

“He’s not real!” screamed Aligh, his mind undone by the sight of Nautilus. “It was just a story!”

“He looks pretty damn real to me!” shouted Sarah over the cacophony of smashing wood, tearing sails, and terrified screams. Fiery heat washed over her as Nautilus hauled his bulk over the gunwale, and turned his infernal gaze upon her.

She felt the deathly heat of it crawling over her skin, its touch loathsome and invasive, as if the titan of the deeps could see into her very soul.

His titanic weight heeled the ship over again, and Sarah grabbed hold of the looped pulley ropes as the deck tilted crazily. The front of the cannon slid sideways as the block and tackle swung wildly and its knotted end strained to bear its colossal weight. The wooden pegs securing the wheels of the gun carriage in place creaked ominously.

Aligh pulled his way along the cannon toward her.

“I won’t go alone!” he screamed. “If the ocean wants me, I’ll drag you down with me!”

The man was a lunatic, like the crippled sailors raving in Bilgewater’s alleys with a mind destroyed by the foulest rotgut. His fraudulent serpent caller robes had come loose, and dangling from his neck on a leather thong was a silver-and-brass sigil of three intertwined serpents.

Swinging on the pulley, Sarah tried to kick him away, but he had a madman’s strength, clawing at her throat with his free hand. Cracked fingernails drew blood, and she struggled to find purchase as the ship tipped over onto its side, its port side now completely underwater.

Far above them, Nautilus drew back his anchor once again and brought it down like a colossal woodsman’s axe.

Its unnatural mass sheared through the deck amidships, and Sarah heard the thunderous crack of the keel finally splitting. The vessel’s stern rose up sharply, and the sounds of Aligh’s screaming crew echoed in the mist.

On the ocean, we are all equal, went the old saying, but right now Sarah didn’t give a wharf-rat’s shit for those murderous, traitorous bastards.

Let them all drown.

The front half of the ship sprang up with the force of the blow, then slammed back down onto the ocean, tilting back upright as seawater poured into the bow section. The weight of it was dragging the prow deeper underwater with every passing second.

In moments, nothing would remain on the surface.

A body slammed into the deck next to her; Aligh’s tattooed daughter, the one with Sarah’s stiletto still jammed in her brain.

Slicks of black fluid spilled from her mouth and swirled in her eyes.

With a groan of screeching metal, Nautilus reached for Aligh with a massive, corroded gauntlet. His crushing grip fastened on the treacherous captain’s torso and pulled. Aligh held fast to Sarah with lunatic strength, as though they embraced like lovers.

She couldn’t shake him loose.

“All because you wouldn’t pay the damn tithe,” snarled Sarah, as Aligh fought to hold on to her.

“The ocean will take you as well as me!” he screamed.

“Not today,” said Sarah, reaching up and back to grip the skull-pommel of the stiletto wedged in the soft tissue under the tattooed twin’s jaw.

She pulled hard, and the blade slid free in a welter of fluids.

“You want him?” said Sarah, reversing her grip on the weapon. “He’s all yours!”

She rammed the blade into the side of Aligh’s neck, driving it hard through to the other side. His head snapped back and Sarah’s hand flashed out to catch a falling leather thong cut loose from around Aligh’s throat. His grip spasmed, and the metal titan wrenched him back just as the deck hook securing Sarah’s rope loop snapped.

The full weight of the cannon yanked on the block and tackle, lifting Sarah away from the weapon and Aligh. Swinging wildly above the sinking ship, she watched as Nautilus turned and sank back into the ocean, the screaming Aligh clutched in one iron fist.

The water closed over him, a trail of frantic bubbles following Aligh down as Nautilus returned to the darkness below with his bounty. As Aligh was dragged down, Sarah took grim pleasure in seeing the look of terror in his eyes at his fate; condemned to an eternity in darkness without so much as a pauper’s marker to his name.

The Moon Serpent’s prow rose almost vertically in the ocean, and Sarah swung on the rope to reach the jutting, serpent figurehead. Her booted feet caught the silver fangs, and she managed to remain upright as the ship slowly sank into the ocean.

With a moment’s pause, she saw the back half of the boat was almost entirely underwater, with only a few sailors crowded in around the upright stern, so close she could likely have swung over to reach them. One of the survivors was Petyr Harker, and she felt bilious hatred rise in her gorge.

“I did tell you I was just the sort of fellow to seek dramatic revenge in some stupidly elaborate scheme,” said Petyr. “Admittedly, I didn’t quite see it turning out like this, but at least—”

Sarah didn’t give him a chance to finish, throwing the rope loop toward him like a lasso, and no harpooner had ever cast so perfect a throw.

The loop settled around Petyr’s neck like a noose, but before he could lift it clear, Sarah drew her pistol and aimed upward.

“Say hello to Aligh on the way down, Petyr,” she said, and pulled the trigger.

The shot smashed the block and tackle straining to hold the cannon’s enormous weight, and it immediately fell into the ocean. Sarah had a fraction of a second to savor the look of horror in Petyr’s eyes before the rope snapped taut and wrenched him from his perch.

His scream was cut short as he hit the water and vanished into the depths as the cannon dragged him all the way down.

Standing atop the serpent figurehead, Sarah watched the Moon Serpent’s stern finally go under in a swirl of foaming water and cracking timbers. The few sailors still clinging to the wreckage paddled frantically on the surface before the suction of the wreck finally pulled them down with it.

Looking down, she reckoned she had a few seconds at best before the prow did the same to her.

“Shame to send something so beautiful to the deep,” said a voice behind her, and Sarah smiled.

She looked over her shoulder to see Rafen in their landing boat, soaked to the skin and covered in cuts, bruises, and bites. The storm lamp on the prow bobbed like a welcome beacon of safety.

“Thank you kindly, old man,” she said.

“I meant the cannon,” said Rafen, carefully rowing toward her. “A finer thirty pounder I’ve yet to see.”

“Aye,” agreed Sarah, “but it’s tradition, and you don’t go messing with traditions, right?”

“Right indeed,” said Rafen.

“So where in the name of the Bearded Lady did you get to?” asked Sarah, “I needed you on the damn deck when everything went to shit.”

Rafen shrugged and said, “Went below to get another bottle of rum and ran into Aligh’s crew fixing to get a-murderin’. They didn’t take kindly to being discovered and tried to cut my damn head off. Managed to gut a couple with some borrowed steel, but had to jump out of a gunport before they shanked me good. Swam around to get our boat, getting feasted on by all that lives under the surface, thank you very much. But I’m here now, so do you want to get on board or are you planning to go down with the ship?”

“This ship’s captain’s already gone with her,” said Sarah, stepping casually from the figurehead to the landing boat.

With her safely aboard, Rafen rowed them away from the doomed Moon Serpent as the figurehead and its topmost mast finally went under in a swirl of bubbles, rope, and broken spars.

Sarah moved to the back of the landing boat, now seeing she wasn’t the only passenger Rafen had picked up. A bloodied body in a lacerated coat of pale blue, gold cuffs, and frayed bronze epaulettes lay slumped in the landing boat’s bilges.

“Blaxton?” said Sarah. “She’s still alive?”

“Just about,” said Rafen. “She’s a blowhard, but she didn’t deserve to go down with scum like Aligh. Didn’t feel right to leave her to drown, right?”

Sarah said nothing, too exhausted to do more than nod.

“So you going to tell me what in the eight seas happened up there?” asked Rafen.

“You’d never believe me,” said Sarah.

“I’m guessing it was you that sank the ship firing the damn cannon into the deck?” said Rafen.

“Wasn’t me. What happened up there was all Aligh’s doing,” said Sarah, with a look that told him not to ask more.

“Fair enough.”

“Though I did manage to get this.” She opened her palm to reveal a disc stamped with three intertwined serpents of silver and brass.

“Aligh’s sigil,” said Rafen.

“Might not mean much these days, but we’ll see what happens when I show it to the rest of his crew, once they’ve sobered up.”

Rafen grinned. “Well, at least this trip wasn’t a total waste of time.”

Sarah slumped in the back of the boat and watched as the rearing crag of Moonshard Reef began to fade into the mist. She narrowed her eyes as she saw a lone figure climb from the water and shake itself dry.

A hunched wretch in an expensive kraken-skin coat.

“Thorne,” she whispered. “It’s always the bloody rats that make it out.”

“What’s that?” said Rafen, mid-row. “Someone else made it out?”

“No,” said Sarah, turning away. “No one at all.”

Tamara forces herself to rise early - an easy habit to get into when the earth is your bed and fallen leaves the only blanket. Less so when the mattress is stuffed with goose down and the sheets woven from soft cotton. The curtains are pulled back, and warm light pools on the floor of her third floor boarding room. She’d closed the curtains on her first night in Piltover and had slept two hours past dawn, which worried her so much, she has never closed them since.

Swinging herself out of bed, she strides naked to the window and taps the colored glass with a callused fingertip, black with sooty residue from the workshop. The light shimmers on her skin, her frame wolf-lean and wiry-muscled. Despite that, she rubs a hand across her belly as if fearing it has grown soft. Below her, the cobbled street is already busy with stall-holders setting up to catch Progress Day’s early trade. Colorful bunting to celebrate this auspicious day is strung between every building, giving the narrow street a festive atmosphere so unlike the city Tamara calls home. Cog and key banners of gold and crimson silk hang from the distant towers glittering on the upper slopes of the clan districts. It is there the rivers of gold said to flow through Piltover’s streets have their source.

Tamara grins at the thought and turns from the window. Her room is meticulously tidy, a place for everything and everything in its place. Notebooks are stacked at one corner of her workbench, alongside carefully arranged tools, hex-calipers and folded schemata. Yesterday’s lunch of black bread, cheese and dried fruit sits unopened in muslin wrapping next to her tools. A small metalworking forge is ingeniously built into the brick wall, the fumes carried to the roof via a twisting series of iron pipes. At the center of the desk is a wooden box in which sits the device that has taken her many months of effort to construct, working from the plans etched into rolls of wax-paper she keeps hidden beneath her mattress.

She reaches under her bed for the chamber pot and relieves herself before quickly freshening up with the powders and tinctures provided by her host. She dresses in the rugged clothes of an apprenta; simple leggings, an undershirt equipped with numerous pockets and a wrap-around doublet with an ingenious system of hooks and eye fasteners that can be ripped off with one quick pull. She’d been puzzled at the need for this until Gysbert had blushingly told her it was to make it easier to get off in the event of it catching fire in a workshop.

She checks her reflection in a polished glass mirror hanging on a brass hook on the back of her door, brushing her long dark hair back over her ears and securing it with a leather thong and copper hair-clips. Tamara runs her fingers over her high cheekbones then along the line of her chin, and is satisfied by what she sees. Colette keeps telling her she could do more with her looks, but her friend is young and hasn’t yet learned the danger of being memorable.

Tamara places the wooden box in her shoulder bag, together with the muslin wrapped food and a selection of notebooks and pencils. She’s nervous, but that’s understandable. This is a big day for her, and she doesn’t want to fail.

She removes the chair wedging her door shut and turns the locking wheel to release the bars securing it in place. Compared to where she comes from, Piltover is a safe place, its violent crime rate absurdly low. Its inhabitants are untroubled by the everyday violence of most other cities, but they are not so foolish as to believe they can do without locks on their doors.

Especially in the weeks leading up to Progress Day.

Tamara locks her door and pauses on her way down the stairs to empty her chamber pot in the boarding house’s central chute for the disposal of night-soil. She used to wonder where it ended up, before realizing that shit only ever flows downward. Somewhere below in Zaun, there’s a garden that likely blooms like no other. She places the pot in its assigned cubbyhole for cleaning, and makes her way down the winding screw-stair to the communal dining room. A few of her fellow apprenta are either breaking their fast or frantically tinkering with the devices they hope will finally get them noticed by one of the clans. Tamara places a hand over her shoulder bag, feeling a sense of pride at what she has made. She’d followed the plans exactly, even though the finishing touches went against the grain of her stoic professionalism.

She waves in response to a few weary hellos, but doesn’t stop to talk. Few of them will have slept more than an hour or two a night for the last fortnight, and she will be surprised if some of them don’t fall asleep during their auditions today. She’s out the door to the street before anyone can delay her, and the brightness of the sun pulls her up short.

The high buildings of her street are constructed of square-cut limestone and chamfered timber. Embellished with bronze facings, leaded glass and copper eaves, dazzling sunlight glitters from every surface. The streets are busy and loud, filled with moderately well-dressed men and women moving back and forth. Couriers push between apparitors, victuallers and tallymen, who shout after them and wave their fists. A few vagabond tinkers ply their suspect wares on canvas cloths atop barrelheads, ready to run at the first sight of a warden. Sumpsnipes who’ve hitched a lift on the Rising Howl from Zaun lurk at the edges of the street, scanning the passing trade for someone to cutpurse. These are the younger, inexperienced ones, forced away from the easy pickings of the cross-chasm bridges by the older, stronger kids.

Tamara keeps a wary eye on them as she moves down the street, her steps precise and measured. She has little enough worth stealing, but the last thing she needs today is a sumpsnipe picking something he shouldn’t from her. The smell of roasting fish and fresh-baked Shuriman sunbread from an open dining hall makes her mouth water. Instead, she stops a woman pushing a wheeled barrel encircled by hissing pipes and purchases a hot tisane, together with one of the sugared pastries she has come to love a little too much.

“Happy Progress Day, dearheart!” says the woman as Tamara places a silver gear in her hand and tells her to keep the change. “May the cogs turn clockwise for you today, my lovely.”

The woman’s accent sounds oddly lean and leisurely to Tamara, as if she has all the time in the world to voice what she wants to say, yet it is not uncommon this close to the Boundary Markets: a blend of Piltovan affectation and the looser familiarity of Zaun.

“Thank you,” replies Tamara. “May the Gray never rise to your door.”

The woman taps her head and her heart, a sure sign that she is born of parents from above and below. As much as the citizens of Piltover and Zaun like to pretend they are separate entities, both are far more intertwined than they might openly admit. Tamara wolfs down her pastry and follows the road to its end, exactly twenty steps distant, where it meets the larger thoroughfare of Horologica Avenue. She turns right, finishing her tisane and counting her steps as she crosses each intersecting street. The buildings here are grander than the apprenta quarter where she’s billeted, fashioned from polished granite and ironwork columns.

Many boast flickering chemtech lamps that give the morning air a crisp, actinic flavor. It seems pointless to burn them given the early hour, but Tamara has learned a great deal of Piltover society is dominated by perceived wealth and power - one being a factor of the other. It’s everywhere she looks: in the cut of the clothes people wear, the vividness of the colors and the extent of their publicized philanthropy. Tamara sees numerous couples taking their morning constitutional; well-appointed men and women adorned with subtle augments. One woman wears an implanted cheek-plate with a gem-like hextech loupe over one eye. Her arm is linked with a man bearing a metallic gauntlet that flickers with traceries of light. Across the street, another hunched man in overalls wears what appears to be some form of breathing apparatus on his back - tanks filled with bubbling greenish liquid that vent puffs of atomized vapor.

She sees people look on in admiration and wonderment, but her gaze has been trained to notice what others do not.

The two hextech augments are fake.

Tamara has studied Piltover’s emergent technology closely enough to know what is real and what is not. The cheek-plate is molded silver glued to the woman’s face, and her loupe is nothing more than a lapidary’s lens engraved with a maker’s mark she assumes is fictional. Her beau’s hand is an ordinary bronze gauntlet with glass channels filled with bioluminescent algae scraped from one of Zaun’s cultivairs. Only the breathing apparatus is genuine, and the bloodshot redness of the hunched man’s eyes, combined with the tougher, hard-wearing nature of his overalls, tells Tamara he is from a deep level of Zaun.

She travels from Horologica Avenue to Glasswell Street, along the winding Boulevard of a Hundred Taverns and thence into Sidereal Avenue to Incognia Plaza, where Zindelo’s great sphere sits inactive as it has done since the inventor’s mysterious disappearance last year. Crowds gather around the latticework artifact; gaggles of would-be inventors, artists and pallid, hack-coughed Zaunites who have traveled up-city for the day.

Deep in his cups, Gysbert has told her Progress Day is viewed very differently down in his hometown of Zaun, which he insists was the original City of Progress before Piltover came along. Above, Progress Day marks the moment the Sun Gates opened for the first time, allowing trade to pass easily between the east and west of Valoran. It also marks the moment when taxation on that trade turned the trickle of gold entering the city’s coffers into a fast flowing river. Below in Zaun, it is a day to remember those lost in the geological upheaval that created the east-west passage and submerged entire districts underwater.

One day, two very different perceptions.

Tamara passes through the square, avoiding sprinting pneuma-tube runners as they race to bear messages to their destinations. A promenade courtier, Noami Kimba, waves to her and blows her a kiss. They have met three times in the sultry air of evening, and each time Kimba has offered her a chance to spend the night in her arms. Tamara has refused each time, too busy for any diversions, but if she is able to stay longer than today, she may take her up on the next offer. She makes her way to the plaza’s northern archway as a massively bearded man with metaled shoulder guards and an iron skullcap enters. His arms are pneumatic, piston-driven monstrosities, and Tamara recognizes one of the nameless hierophant cultists of the Glorious Evolved. He grunts at her, before entering the square to harangue passers-by with his zealous blend of theology and techno-sorcery. She leaves him to it and turns onto Oblique Lane, heading toward Techmaturgy Bridge, counting her steps as she goes.

The city opens up before her, revealing the great split that divides northern and southern Piltover. The yawning chasm looks as though it ought to be ancient, the result of natural geological forces, but it came into existence within living memory and nothing natural created it. Man’s hubris and desire to master the elements wrought it. Tamara admires the strength of will it must have taken to enact a plan of such audacity that the splitting of the earth and the destruction of half of Zaun was seen as an acceptable price to pay for future prosperity.

The great tower of the College of Techmaturgy rises arrogantly from the wide canyon, anchored to the upper cliffs by swaying suspension bridges and thick iron cables that thrum like musical strings when the winds blow in hard from the ocean. The main bridge is an arched wonder of steel and stone, thronged with people moving between Piltover’s two halves and cursing the vintners and purveyors of sweetmeats whose rival stalls have created a bottleneck at its center. Revelers still drunk from the night before are shepherded onward by wardens in blue jackets, gleaming boots and checkered trousers. In any other city, they would look ridiculous, but here their gaudy appearance actually seems normal. Sumpsnipes with razor-rings dart through the crowds and more than one reveler will be returning home with what remains of their purse slit and emptied.

The north of the city is where the bulk of the clans have their mansions and heavily guarded workshop compounds. Most of the traffic today is heading in that direction. She sees a good many apprenta making their way across the bridge, each bearing their invention with the care of a mother bearing a newborn babe. She seeks out the familiar faces of Gysbert and Colette, but there are simply too many people to pick out her fellow apprenta. Tamara reaches the end of the bridge, and takes a breath. Normally, she is not scared of high places, but the dizzying scale of the height difference between Piltover and Zaun is breathtaking.

Two statues of robed officials flank the road onto the bridge, one representing the spirit of wealth, the other the essence of honesty. Tamara digs out a bronze washer and places the coin in the outstretched palm of the first statue. The weight of it triggers an internal mechanism and the fingers close over the coin. When they open a moment later, it has gone.

“I always go with the other one,” says a man appearing beside her. He is handsome, dark-haired, and smooth-skinned, which means he is rich. His breath reeks of last night’s shimmerwine. “I find it helps to pay for the things I don’t have.”

Tamara ignores him and carries on her way.

He moves after her, made persistent by the dulled senses of a hangover and too much money in his purse.

“Here, now wait a minute, there’s no need to be rude, young lady.”

“I’m not being rude, I have somewhere to be and I don’t want to talk to you,” she says.

He follows her onto the bridge with a laugh that tells her he sees her as a challenge, someone he thinks he can buy with a few gold hex.

“Aha, you’re an apprenta, aren’t you?” he says, finally recognizing her clothes and seeing the bag on her shoulder. “On your way to the auditions, eh? Hoping to catch the eye of an artificer and be snatched up by one of the great houses, are we?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes,” she answers, hoping against hope that he will hear the brusqueness of her tone and leave her alone. Instead, he increases his pace and stands in front of her, blocking her passage across the bridge. He looks her up and down, as though examining a piece of livestock he’s thinking of buying.

“You’re a fine looking specimen, my girl. A bit bony, but nothing a few meals at Lacabro’s wouldn’t sort, eh? What do you say? It’s Progress Day, everyone should have a bit of fun, eh?”

“I’m not interested,” says Tamara, moving to push past him. “Get out of my way and leave me alone.”

“Now listen here, lass, my name is Cella Allabroxus, and I know a few of the bigwigs on the north side,” he says, continuing to block her way. “Spend the morning with me and I’ll put in a good word for you, make sure your audition gets a bit of a boost, if you know what I mean?”

“No, thanks,” says Tamara, and she can see what’s coming next. He reaches for her arm, but she catches his hand before it makes contact, twisting it around and drawing a surprised gasp of pain from him. If she applies even a fraction more pressure, his wrist will snap like kindling. She uses his pain to maneuver him toward the bridge’s parapet. Her fear of heights quite forgotten, she presses Cella Allabroxus back against the waist-high stonework.

“I asked you nicely to leave me alone,” she says, pressing hard on Allabroxus’s wrist and drawing a whimper of pain from him. “Now I’m asking again, albeit not so nicely. Leave me alone or I will push you off this bridge and when they find what’s left of you spread out over the rooftops of Zaun, they’ll think you were just another drunk who couldn’t walk a straight line over the bridge. Are we clear?”

He nods, in too much pain to speak.

“I don’t need your ‘good word’ or any kind of ‘boost’. I’m pretty damn good at what I do, and I’ll stand or fall on my own, thank you very much. Now smile at me, walk away and go home. Sleep off the wine and remember this moment any time you feel like being discourteous to a lady.”

Cella Allabroxus gasps as Tamara releases his wrist. For a moment she sees he is tempted to retort with something offensive, but she cocks an eyebrow and he thinks better of it. Cradling his wrist, he scurries back the way he came and Tamara lets out a weary sigh. She catches the eye of a sumpsnipe gang loitering on the other side of the roadway and nods in the direction of the fleeing Allabroxus. The footpads take her meaning and race after the man.

“What was that all about?” says a young voice behind her.

The tautness drains from Tamara’s body and she lets a looseness return to her limbs. The cold determination Allabroxus saw falls from her face, replaced with an open smile.

“Nothing,” she says, turning to see Gysbert and Colette. “Just a drunk who thought he’d try his luck.”

“You’re late,” says Gysbert, pointing over the parapet at the dulled metal sides of a mechanized clocktower a hundred feet or so below the level of the bridge. “Look.”

“What are you talking about?” answers Tamara. “I don’t think Old Hungry’s told the right time in years.”

“True,” he says, and though he’s trying to look angry, his eyes speak only of infatuation. “But we agreed to meet before Old Hungry’s shadow was past the Techmaturgy tower.”

He points to where the dark outline of the mysterious clocktower has fallen across the lower laboratory levels of the tower, where greenish-gray fumes leak from hornpipe vents. “See?”

Tamara smiles and puts her hand on his shoulder. He glances down at the point of contact and any anger he might actually be feeling vanishes.

Colette rolls her eyes and says, “Come on, let’s get going. Gysbert might be foolish enough to forgive your lateness, but Clan Medarda won’t. They shut the gates at third bell and they rang the second before we reached the bridge.”

The manor house of Clan Medarda is not far from the northern end of the bridge, but the streets are busy and there will be many others seeking entry to display their creations at the auditions.

“You’re right,” says Tamara, hefting her shoulder bag and patting the device within. “Let’s go and show those rich sons of bitches what we can make.”

The gates of Clan Medarda’s mansion house are imposing creations of tempered steel set in a high wall of alabaster white stone. Bronze busts of its illustrious family members sit in numerous alcoves along the length of the wall, including the clan’s current head, Jago Medarda. Scores of eager apprenta are gathered by the opened gates, each bearing a prized invention they hope will see them secure a contract of servitude with this illustrious house. The politeness on display is endearing to Tamara, with each apprenta being careful not to jostle their neighbor’s creation.

Men in the clan’s colors, armed with swords and pikes, guard the entrance, checking the authenticity of each supplicant’s paperwork before allowing them entry. Tamara watches them as they work, admiring their professionalism and thoroughness. A few apprenta are turned away, their papers incorrectly stamped or fraudulent. They don’t protest, but simply walk away with a resigned shrug.

When it’s their turn, Tamara, Colette, and Gysbert are allowed in without a hitch. Colette had taken it upon herself to ensure their papers were in order, and the youngster is a stickler for details. It’s a trait Tamara believes will stand the girl in good stead in the years to come.

Just as they pass through the gates and third bell rings from the Piltover Treasury building, Tamara feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She has learned to trust this instinct over the years and pauses, as if to adjust the straps of her shoulder bag, looking back to the street. Sitting on the rim of a marble fountain is a woman wearing the loosely tied jacket of a Piltover sheriff, a customized cap pulled low over her shadowed features. One leg is cocked at an angle, her elbow resting atop it as her gaze sweeps the throng of apprenta. There’s a long-barreled rifle over her shoulder, one with what looks like a gleaming gemstone enclosed in a lattice of silver wire. Her gaze pauses on Tamara, who turns away before it can linger too long.

Tamara knows that look: it is the look of a hunter.

The gates shut and she catches up to Colette and Gysbert, who stand in a twenty-strong crowd staring in open-mouthed wonder at what seems at first glance to be a simple carriage. But then Tamara notices the underslung hextech pod and the knot of gold and silver cabling linking it to the front and rear axles. A soft light glows within the pod and Tamara tastes copper on her tongue.

“It’s a self-locomotor,” says Gysbert. “One of Uberti’s designs, if I’m not mistaken.”

“It can’t be,” says Tamara. “She works exclusively for Clan Cadwalder.”

“Not for long, I hear,” says Colette.

“What do you mean?” asks Gysbert.

“Scuttlebut around the workbench says one of Medarda’s agents stole a copy of the schematics,” says Colette, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Rumor has it things got pretty bloody. Bodies all cut up, that sort of thing. Folks are saying Clan Torek are looking to lure her away, but Clan Cadwalder won’t admit anything, of course.”

“Well, they wouldn’t, would they?” says Tamara, as the lacquered black doorway to the manor house opens. “A public admission that their head artisan’s designs were stolen would make them look weak.”

A steward bearing a long black staff and liveried in the crimson and gold of Clan Medarda ushers the hopeful apprenta into the manor house. Tamara hears sighs of wonderment as he leads them through its vaulted antechambers, luxurious reception rooms and grand galleries. The clan’s conspicuous wealth is displayed for all to see in gold-framed portraits that fill entire walls, giant sandstone statues of beast-headed warriors conveyed at enormous expense from Shuriman tombs, and crossed weapons that bear the hallmarks of Ionian design. The floors are gleaming marble flagstones, the grand staircase wide and crafted from the whorled boles of Freljordian Ironwood trees.

Tamara sees that everything in this house is artfully crafted to intimidate and remind the visitor just how little their achievements matter in the face of what Clan Medarda has acquired. She looks up in time to see a woman in a floor-length gray dress and crimson-tasseled pelisse glide being escorted across a mezzanine level by another steward. The heels of her boots click with a strange metallic cadence, and she looks down upon the herd of apprenta with the ghost of a smile creasing her lips as she passes from sight.

Eventually the steward halts their march in a moderately sized waiting room with a herringbone-patterned floor and a Revek clock fashioned from ivory and mother-of-pearl that keeps time with metronomic precision. An imposing set of black-lacquered doors with a hatch at eye level leads onward, but the steward raps his staff on the wooden floor and indicates that they should sit on benches set against each wall.

“When your name is called, enter the proving chamber,” he says. “Move to the lectern and state your name. Give a short explanation of what you will be demonstrating, followed by a brief - and I cannot stress that word enough, brief - explanation of its workings. You will be judged by the learned artificers of Clan Medarda, so assume they know more than you. My advice is to keep your answers short, as they bore easily. If you are successful, take the left door onward. If you are unsuccessful, take the right door onward. That is all. And good luck.”

The steward has given this speech many times before, but Tamara hears sincerity in his last words to them. She places a hand on her shoulder bag, knowing that on any other day, the device within would be enough to secure her a place at any one of Piltover’s clan houses. She shares a look with Gysbert and Colette. Both are nervous, and she is surprised to find her own heart racing. She has spent so long preparing for the Progress Day audition that the thought of stumbling at this last hurdle makes her sick to her stomach. It has been a long time since she felt this way, and she smiles, welcoming the sensation. It will keep her sharp and focused. She reaches over to take Gysbert’s hand and gives it a squeeze. Sweat dapples his brow and he smiles weakly in thanks. Colette is staring straight ahead, scanning the faces on the other side of the room, no doubt wondering who might make the cut and who will fall by the wayside.

The hatch in the black door slides back and everyone tenses. A name is called, and a young girl across from them stands. The door opens from the other side and she shuffles nervously through it. A musty smell of aged wood and charged atmosphere gusts from the proving chamber, and Tamara tries to imagine what it will be like.

Another six apprenta pass through the door before one of their names is called. Colette is first, and she stands with determination, lets out a breath, and walks through the door without a backward glance.

“She’ll be great,” says Gysbert under his breath. “I know it.”

“So will you, Gys,” says Tamara, though she suspects his nerves will likely get the better of him. The kid from Zaun is skilled, but more than just his nerves will count against him in the grand halls of a Piltovan clan.

Two more apprenta are called. Looking at the clock, Tamara sees each audition is getting shorter. Are the learned artisans of Clan Medarda already getting bored? Will that count for or against those yet to demonstrate their devices?

Gysbert all but jumps off the bench when his name is called. He almost drops his bag, but catches it at the last minute, his face red with worry and dripping in sweat.

“Take a deep breath,” Tamara advises him. “You know this stuff. Your work is good.”

“But is it good enough?” he asks.

Tamara thinks she knows the answer, but nods and says, “It is.”

He passes through the door and more apprenta are called until only Tamara remains. The room is empty, but she can’t shake the feeling that she is being watched. When her name is finally called, it is a relief, and she takes a moment to compose herself before turning and stepping through the door into the proving room.

The chamber beyond is circular and illuminated by glowing spheres of glass that float above sconces carved in the shape of outstretched hands, as though giving light to the world. It’s all Tamara can do to suppress a sneer at the rampant self-aggrandizement. It is a lecture theater, with tiered benches rising in concentric rings to the back wall. A plain wooden lectern and workbench sit in the center of the room, and two doors lead onward. Left for success, right for failure.

The tiered benches are capable of holding at least a hundred people, but only five sit before her. Two men and three women, all wearing the crimson robes of masters. They are scratching on great ledgers with gold-plated quills that echo noisily in the chamber’s excellent acoustics. Every one of them bears a genuine hextech augment, and she senses their eagerness to be done.

“Name?” says one of the women without looking up.

“Tamara Lautari.”

“What will you be demonstrating?” asks one of the men. His lips do not move, and his voice grates artificially from a mesh-fronted neck brace.

Tamara sets her bag down on the workbench and removes her creation, an arrangement of wirework struts arranged in a cube with an acid-engraved sphere at its center.

“I call it the Hex-Armillary Amplifier.”

“How do you hope it will function?” he asks again, and Tamara tries not to show how much his mechanically-rendered voice disturbs her.

“By harnessing the properties of a crystal and exponentially increasing its output beyond anything that’s been achieved so far.”

She says the words neutrally, but the arrogance of what she says does not go unnoticed. Every one of the masters now fixes their gaze upon her. They are likely used to hearing grand claims from apprenta, but the confidence in her tone clearly piques their interest.

“And how will you do that?” asks a white-haired man with a gem-faceted eye set in a porcelain plate upon his burn-scarred face.

“The geometries of a crystal are vital, as is the axis upon which it spins,” says Tamara, opening a delicate hatch in the sphere to reveal a precisely engineered cradle. Thin chains, like those of an expensive necklace, hang down, ready to secure a power crystal. “My device reads the speed and angle of spin, adjusting it to achieve optimum power delivery.”

“Absurd,” says a woman with an artificial arm and the penetrating gaze of an academic who has heard every wild idea from her students and dismissed them all. “There is no time in the discharge of a crystal’s power to adjust it with any degree of control. Praveen tried the same thing two years ago and almost brought down half the goldsmithing district.”

“Respectfully, ma’am, I disagree.”

“Your disagreement is irrelevant, apprenta. Can you prove it? Can you demonstrate what you claim?”

“I believe so,” replies Tamara.

“Belief is not the basis of science,” says the woman, as if speaking to a confident but ill-informed child. “Empirical evidence is what is demanded.”

“I can do it,” promises Tamara.

The woman looks unconvinced, but nods and says, “Very well, you may begin.”

A hatch slides open in the workbench beside Tamara. A fretwork stand rises from below, holding a small, faceted crystal of sapphire blue that shimmers with its own internal light.

A hextech crystal.

The crystal is no bigger than her thumbnail, but it is the future.

This is what could make the clans of Piltover rulers of the world if they so desired. Or, if not them, whoever can craft it more efficiently and without the years of work to produce a single item. This crystal has only a low level of power left in it, but it is still immeasurably powerful and outrageously valuable.

She hadn’t anticipated it would also be so beautiful.

“Well, go on then,” says the burn-scarred man. “Dazzle us.”

She lifts the crystal from its holder. It’s warm to the touch, vibrating at a level almost too subtle to detect. It is far heavier than she expects. With exquisite care, Tamara places the crystal within her sphere and fastens it with delicate chains. She checks it is secure and seals her device. The mechanism atop the cube is movable and she twists its interlocking parts to arrange the cardinal points of contact into their engaged positions.

Her device starts to hum as the conduits find a source of power in the crystal, and a soft blue glow emanates from within. Tamara grins as her device spools up. The hum builds and the taste of metal in her mouth grows stronger. It is getting louder now, unpleasantly so, pulsing in waves.

The light spheres around the hall pulse in concert with the rise and fall of the bass thrum coming from her device. It is moving across the workbench, the vibrations jittering it left and right, up and down. Crackles of energy flicker around the sphere, flaring from its upper surfaces like lightning running in reverse.

“Turn it off, Mistress Lautari!”

Tamara reaches for her device, but a whip of blue light lashes out, carving an angry red weal over the back of her hand. She flinches and backs away from her rapidly overloading device.

“I can’t,” says Tamara in dismay. “It’s optimizing too fast!”

She always knew this was going to happen, but she’d hoped the changes she made to the design wouldn’t fail quite as catastrophically as this. A bolt of blue fire arcs out of her machine toward one of the light spheres. It explodes in a shower of magnesium-bright sparks.

Another follows, then three more. Soon the only light is the violent blue glow of Tamara’s crackling device. The woman with the hextech arm stands and makes a fist. With a rush of sliding metal, the entire workbench falls into the floor, which promptly seals up after it. The outline of the trapdoor is briefly limned in light and a hard bang of detonation echoes from far below.

“A safety chamber,” says Tamara, relieved her device didn’t explode a few seconds earlier.

“Yes, Mistress Lautari,” says the woman, sitting back down and picking up her golden quill. “Do you think you are the first apprenta to come before us with a potentially lethal invention?”

“I suppose not,” answers Tamara. She is disappointed, but not surprised. This was always the intended outcome, despite the best efforts of professional pride to sabotage her purpose.

The man with the hextech eye writes in his ledger and speaks without looking at her.

“I think you know which door to take.”

Tamara’s exit from Clan Medarda’s mansion is far less grand than her entrance. The rightmost door opens into a bare stone corridor that winds downward through the rock of the cliffs until it reaches a steel door with enough reinforcement to withstand a siege ram. A heavily muscled enforcer type with hexdraulic arms and a helmet she’s not sure is actually a helmet opens the door. She’s barely through it before it’s slammed shut behind her.

It opens onto a side street lower down the city, one that leads back to the cliffs. Not quite Zaun, but not entirely Piltover. The street is paved with mismatched cobbles and foggy with low lying scraps of the Zaun Gray. Gysbert sits opposite on a crumbling brick wall, the smashed remains of his device lying strewn at his feet.

He smiles as he sees her and says, “It didn’t go well?”

“Not exactly.”

“What happened?”

“It exploded.”

His eyes widen in surprise. He laughs, then claps a hand over his mouth. “Sorry, shouldn’t laugh. Exploded?”

She nods and grins. He laughs again.

“At least all mine did was fall apart,” he says. “Not that it matters. As if Medarda would let a Zaunite into their hallowed ranks!”

She ignores his bitterness and asks, “Have you seen Colette?”

Gysbert’s eyes light up at the prospect of delivering good news.

“I haven’t. I think she made it.”

Tamara lets out a sigh of relief.

“Well, at least one of us got in,” she says. “So… shall we drown our sorrows? It’s Progress Day, after all. I think we’ve earned a few after nearly blowing up the learned masters.”

A figure moves into view, lithe and silhouetted against the light at the end of the street. Others are with her, but they’re clearly deferring to her since she’s the one with the long-barreled rifle pulled tight to her shoulder. The weapon’s muzzle is unwavering, its sights firmly aimed at Tamara’s head. “Sorry, Mistress Lautari,” says the sheriff she’d seen earlier today, “but I don’t think you’ll be getting that drink.”

Gysbert’s protests are brushed aside as the sheriff and her men lead Tamara away. He hasn’t the courage to follow her, and she’s glad of that. She doesn’t want him dragged into this. She’s frogmarched toward the edge of the cliff, and for a wild moment she thinks they’re going to throw her over the edge.

But this is Piltover. They do things by the book here. Back home, she’d already have a knife in her guts or be sailing through the air on a long drop to the spires of the city below. Instead, they turn into a narrow overhanging street that winds along the line of the cliffs toward the great funicular that leads down to the busy wharves on the ocean passage through the city.

“Are you arresting me?” asks Tamara. “What did I do?”

“Really? You’re going to play dumb?” asks the sheriff. “We searched your room and found everything. The hextech journals, the schematics.”

“I’m an apprenta,” says Tamara. “I’m supposed to have schematics.”

They reach an iron-mesh platform attached to a collimated series of rails angled down toward the ocean and docks below. Hundreds of ships throng the wide channel, moored in the shadow of the titanic form of the Sun Gates that allow sea transit from east to west. Some are just passing through, while others berthed offload goods before filling their holds with the bounty Piltover and Zaun have to offer. Tamara sees Freljordian ice-runners, Noxian troop barques, Shuriman grain-galleys and even a few vessels that look suspiciously like they’ve recently sailed from the thieves’ haven of Bilgewater.

Watching over them all are Piltover’s warship squadrons: sleek, ebon-hulled vessels with twin banks of oars and iron-sheathed rams. Rumor has it they’re powered by more than just the strength of their oarsmen and that each is equipped with a battery of powerful hextech weaponry. Tamara doesn’t know if that’s true, but that people believe it is true is all that matters.

She’s jolted from thoughts of warships as three of the sheriff’s men bundle her onto the elevator, holding her tighter and more painfully than they need to.

“Maybe so, but I don’t think many apprenta have such detailed maps of Piltover hidden within their work. I’m Caitlyn, and I’ve walked a beat for more years than I care to count, so I know this city’s streets better than most. And I have to say, you did a damned accurate job. Even Vi could walk blindfold around Piltover with those plans and not get lost.”

“I don’t follow,” says Tamara, as Caitlyn pulls a lever and the angled elevator begins its juddering descent to the city’s lowest levels.

“Yeah, you’re more a trailblazer than a follower, aren’t you?”

“What does that mean?”

The sheriff doesn’t answer, and Tamara shakes her head, her eyes filling with tears.

“Look, I swear I don’t know what this is all about,” she says, her voice cracking and her chest heaving with sobs. “Please, I’m just an apprenta trying to catch a break. Signing a contract with Clan Medarda was my last chance to make something of myself before my father’s money runs out and I have to indenture myself to one of the Zaun Chem-forges. Please, you have to believe me!”

Her pleas fall on deaf ears, and neither the sheriff or her men bother to answer her increasingly histrionic pleas for compassion and understanding as their descent continues. When the elevator lurches to a halt on the dockside, it’s in the shadow of a Shuriman galleon riding high in the water, its holds freshly unloaded. Tamara sees all her worldly possessions stuffed into a metal cart used to haul grain from the holds of such vessels. Her journals and rolled up plans are inside, pages ripped and torn, months of painstaking work discarded like junk. She smells oil and knows what’s coming next. She throws off the grip of the men holding her and falls to her knees before Caitlyn.

“No! Please, don’t,” she weeps. “Please. I’m begging you!”

Caitlyn ignores her and walks over to the cart. She lifts a smoking pipe from a passing stevedore and tips its burning contents into the cart. The oil-soaked paper of Tamara’s books and plans bursts into flames with a whoosh of ignition. The fire consumes them swiftly, burning everything to ash in a matter of minutes. Smoke curls from the remains of Tamara’s work, and she spits at Caitlyn’s feet.

“Damn you,” she snaps. “May the Gray forever be at your door!”

“Nice try,” says Caitlyn, dragging her to her feet. “You’re pretty tricksy with that accent. It’s good, I’ll give you that. Just enough slang, just enough roughness, but I’ve heard every voice in this city, from top to bottom, and yours just doesn’t fit, you know? A little too much of the soot and spite from your homeland to really pull it off.”

“What are you talking about?” protests Tamara. “I was raised in upper Piltover. I’m a Goldview Lass! Born in sight of the Ecliptic Vaults! I swear I’m not lying!”

Caitlyn shakes her head. She’s tired of this game.

“No, your accent’s good, but it can’t quite cover that guttural Noxian superiority,” she says, punctuating her words with a finger jabbing into Tamara’s chest. “And I know what you are. Yeah, I’ve heard the fireside tales of the warmasons, the warriors who sneak into enemy territory and scout it out. You map out the terrain, find the best ways for an army to advance, laying the groundwork for invasion.”

Tamara doesn’t get the chance to deny the accusation as Caitlyn’s men march her up the gangway and onto the galleon. They hand her to two swarthy Shuriman bladesmen, hard-eyed killers who’d sell their own grandmother for half a silver gear.

“You don’t come back to Piltover,” says Caitlyn, resting her rifle in her arms. “If I see you again, I’ll put a bullet in your head. Understand?”

Tamara doesn’t answer. She sees Caitlyn means every word she says.

“Keep her below, then dump her somewhere unpleasant in Bel’zhun,” says Caitlyn to the shipmaster. “Or throw her overboard once you get far enough out, I don’t care.”

The ship is far out to sea by the time they let her up on deck. Too far from land to swim, but Tamara has no plans to get wet. She watches the glittering jewel of Piltover slide away over the horizon, sad to be leaving, but pleased her mission is finally over.

A shame her artfully prepared plans and schematics went up in smoke, but that was always a risk, and she can recreate them from memory. She closes her eyes and runs through the mental exercises that allow her to conjure walking Piltover’s streets at night, counting steps and mentally mapping every junction, street and winding alley.

She ponders which of the breadcrumbs she left in her wake allowed Caitlyn to draw the net around her, but supposes it doesn’t matter now. The sheriff of Piltover is clever, but Tamara has a nagging sensation it wasn’t actually Caitlyn who discovered her. That worries Tamara, as it means there is someone in Piltover she doesn’t know about who has cunning enough to unmask a warmason.

Whoever it was, and no matter how much they might think they know about the secretive Order of Warmasons, there’s one thing they haven’t yet realized.

That warmasons work in pairs and sometimes it pays to burn one to embed another more deeply in foreign lands.

Tamara smiles to herself, already imagining the valuable intelligence Colette will be gathering for Noxus in the heart of Clan Medarda.

She lies back on a bed of empty grain sacks and settles down to sleep.

Thorva, Sister of Frost, hauled on her reins, dragging her hulking drüvask to a halt alongside Scarmother Vrynna of the Winter’s Claw. The shaggy-furred beast snorted in protest, hot breath steaming the air.

“Hush, Ice-Tooth,” Thorva said. The bone charms and totems wrapped around her wrist rattled as she patted her ill-tempered mount.

A bone-chilling wind whipped across the desolate landscape, yet alone among the raiding party, Thorva did not wear heavy furs and leathers. Her arms, tattooed with swirling indigo ink, were bare to the elements, but she gave no indication of discomfort, for the cold had long relinquished its claim on her.

The imposing figure of Scarmother Vrynna sat astride another drüvask boar, a tusked behemoth even larger than the one Thorva rode. It snarled and stamped one massive, cloven hoof, eyeing Thorva balefully. A sharp kick from Vrynna silenced it.

The scarmother was a ruthless veteran, her victories many and bloody, but Thorva refused to be overawed. Her name was not yet known across the Freljord like the scarmother’s, but she was a shamanka, one who dreamed the will of the gods, and even the most powerful matriarchs in the Freljord were wise to respect the old faith.

The rest of the Winter’s Claw raiding party had reined in, awaiting their scarmother and shamanka. They’d been traveling at pace for much of the day, heading east, deep into Avarosan territory. This was their first stoppage in hours, and they took the opportunity to slide from their saddles, stretching their backs and shaking out numb legs.

The wind picked up, whipping Thorva with snow and ice.

“A storm is coming in,” she said.

Vrynna, her face riven with old scars, did not reply, and continued to stare southward. Vrynna’s right eye was clouded and blind, and there was a streak of white in her dark hair—whatever had caused her wounds had certainly left its mark. Among the Winter’s Claw, such scars were a source of pride and reverence—the mark of a survivor.

“You see something?” asked Thorva.

Vrynna nodded, and continued staring into the distance.

Thorva narrowed her gaze, but could see little through the worsening weather.

“I see nothing.”

“You have two good eyes, yet you are more blind than I am, girl,” snapped Vrynna.

Frost formed around Thorva’s knuckles as her hands clenched, and her irises turned ice-blue. Nevertheless, she reined in her anger, forcing herself to take a deep breath.

It was clear Scarmother Vrynna, like most of the Winter’s Claw, had little time for her or her beliefs. It likely didn’t help that Thorva had chosen to join this raiding party uninvited. No doubt she thought the shamanka joining them may distract those more inclined to superstition, undermining their purpose and her authority.

In truth, a vague but compelling instinct had urged Thorva to join the raid, despite the scarmother’s initial protests, and she had long ago learned to trust such impulses as a gift. The gods wanted her here, but for what purpose, she knew not.

“There, a mile to the south,” pointed Vrynna. “Near that rocky outcrop. See?”

Thorva nodded, finally. A lone figure could just be made out, little more than a shadow against the snow. How Vrynna had spotted it in the first place was beyond her. Thorva frowned as she felt an itching sensation prickle the back of her neck. There was something strange about whoever this was…

The wind billowed, and the figure was obscured once more, yet the persistent unease Thorva felt remained.

“An Avarosan scout?”

“No,” said Vrynna, shaking her head. “They are trudging straight through a deepening drift. Not even a child of the Freljord would make a mistake like that.”

“An outsider, then. But this far north?”

Scarmother Vrynna shrugged. “The Avarosans do not follow the old ways. They trade with southerners rather than simply taking from them. Perhaps this is one of those traders that has lost their way.”

Vrynna spat, dismissively, and hauled her drüvask around to continue on. The other warriors followed her cue, turning the heavy, tusked heads of their own mounts back along the ridgeline, to the east. Only Thorva remained, staring intently into the storm.

“They might have seen us. If they carry word of our presence, the Avarosans will be ready for us.”

“That fool won’t be telling anything to anyone, except perhaps whatever gods they worship in the Beyond,” Vrynna declared. “This storm is worsening. They will be dead by nightfall. Come, we have lingered long enough.”

Still, there was something that bothered Thorva, and she remained on the edge of the ridge, looking back toward the lone outsider, though she could see barely more than a dozen paces now, at best. Was this why she had been brought here?

“Girl!” snapped Vrynna. “Are you coming?”

Thorva looked at Vrynna, then back south.

“No.”

With a nudge, Thorva directed her drüvask boar down the side of the ridge, allowing herself a satisfied smile as she heard Vrynna curse behind her.

“We go after her, yes?”

It was Brokvar Ironfist who spoke, the massive Iceborn warrior who had been her champion and sometime lover for almost a decade.

“The gods will bring ruin upon our tribe if anything happens to her,” Brokvar added.

If forced to pick just one person in the Freljord to fight at her side, Vrynna would choose Brokvar. Half a head taller than the next biggest warrior under her command, he was strong enough to lift a drüvask off the ground, and utterly dependable. He lived to fight—and he did it well—and he carried the broadsword Winter’s-Wail.

That blade was legend among the Winter’s Claw, and had been passed down between Iceborn for centuries. A shard of unmelting True Ice was embedded in the hilt of Winter’s-Wail, and crackling hoarfrost coated its edge. Anyone who wasn’t an Iceborn who tried to grasp it—Vrynna included—would suffer great pain, even death.

If he had one flaw, it was his superstition. He saw portents and prophecy in everything from the flight patterns of ravens to the splatter of blood in the snow, and much to her distaste, he practically worshipped the ground where the self-righteous shamanka walked. Worse, it seemed as if his overt reverence had rubbed off on the other warriors under her command. She saw several of them nodding agreement, and muttering under their breath.

Against her better judgment, Vrynna signaled, and the raiding party swung around, to follow the Sister of Frost.

Scarmother Vrynna was right about one thing: whoever the lone outsider was, they had less understanding of the Freljord than a child.

Watching their exhausted progress through the deep snow, Thorva knew they would be dead within the hour if she simply turned and rode away. In truth, it was a minor miracle they had made it this far, for they were plainly ill-prepared for the harshness of the tundra, and lacked even the most basic understanding of navigating it safely.

As she came closer, unaffected by the bitter wind whipping across the desolate landscape, she saw them stumble. Time and again the outsider struggled vainly back to their feet, but it was obvious their strength was all but spent.

The outsider seemed oblivious to Thorva’s approach. She was closing the distance from outside the periphery of their vision—coming at them from the flank, and slightly behind them—but not once did they turn.

Thorva scanned her surroundings. If there were any rimefangs or other beasts stalking this outsider, now would be the time to strike. Seeing nothing, she pushed on.

She was close enough now to make out more of the outlander’s appearance. It was a man, she saw now, garbed in leathers and furs, though he did not wear them in the Freljordian manner. Foolishly, he carried no spear, axe, sword, or bow. Thorva shook her head. In the Winter’s Claw, from the time one could walk, they were never without a blade. She herself had other more arcane weapons at her disposal, yet even she had three blades on her at all times.

Stranger still, the outsider dragged a pair of chains behind him, affixed to giant manacles of curious design clamped around his wrists…

It was far too late now, but Sylas of Dregbourne realized he had grossly underestimated the sheer, overwhelming hostility of the Freljordian landscape. He understood there was great magical power here, in the north—and now he was here, he could practically feel it in his bones—but it seemed now that it had been a mistake to come here.

A dozen hand-picked mages had set out with him into the frozen north, but each had fallen, one after another, claimed by blizzards, hidden ravines, and savage beasts. He thought the main threat would have come from the barbarian Freljordians themselves, but so far he had not seen a single living soul in the weeks of travel.

How anyone could live out here was beyond him.

He thought they had prepared well, layering themselves in furs and wool, and loading up the heavy, furred oxen with food, firewood, weapons, and coin to barter with; coin liberated from the coffers and chests of the tax-collectors and nobility of his homeland of Demacia.

Not even the oxen had survived this far, though, and now Sylas walked alone.

Sheer force of will and the burning desire to see the monarchy and noble houses of Demacia fall drove him on.

Already he had fomented considerable resistance within the boundaries of Demacia itself. He’d lit the fires of rebellion, but had realized he needed more fuel to see it truly burn. In his cell in Demacia he had consumed every book, chronicle, and tome he was able to get a hold of, and in several of them there had been references of the great and terrible sorcery and ancient magic far to the north. That was the power he needed. Even now, facing death, he believed the power he sought was close…

Nevertheless, not even his stubbornness was enough to overcome the relentless cold. His hands and toes were already turning black and had long gone numb, and a heavy lethargy hung upon him like a weight, dragging him down.

He thought he had seen a column of riders upon a distant ridge some time back, but he was not sure if that was real, or some fevered delusion brought on by exhaustion and the freezing temperature.

To stop was to die, though, he knew that well enough. He would find this power in the north, or he would be damned.

And so he slogged on, one foot in front of the other… but he made it only a dozen more steps before he fell face-first into the snow, and lay still.

Thorva shook her head as she saw the outsider fall, and urged Ice-Tooth forward. The man didn’t make any move to get up this time. For all she knew, he was dead, finally claimed by the unrelenting elements that she herself no longer felt.

Once she was close, Thorva slid from the saddle, sinking almost to her knees as she landed. She approached the face-down man warily, crunching through the snow.

Again she looked at his bonds, curiously.

If he was an escaped prisoner, where had he escaped from?

While the Winter’s Claw did not take prisoners, they did on occasion take thralls—though one that could not be tamed or beaten into service was just another mouth to feed. Thorva didn’t think even the Avarosans would chain someone in this manner. Could he have escaped from the southlands, over the distant mountains?

Grasping her staff in both hands, she prodded him. Getting no reaction, Thorva drove the base of her staff into the snow underneath the outsider, and tried to lever him onto his front. It was a difficult task, for the immense manacles the man wore covered most of his forearms and were incredibly heavy. Grunting with the effort, she finally managed to turn him over.

He flopped over lifelessly, and his furred hood fell back. His eyes were closed and sunken, and his lips tinged blue. Frost had formed on his brows, lashes, and his unshaven cheeks, and his dark hair, tied back in a loose ponytail, was similarly icy.

Thorva allowed her gaze to be drawn to the shackles around his wrists. The Sister of Frost had traveled widely, the duties of her faith taking her to many different tribes over the years, yet these restraints, made of some unknown pale stone, were unlike anything she had seen before. There was something deeply unsettling about them. It was vaguely uncomfortable even to look upon the chains, and they had clearly been made in such a manner that they were never intended to be removed. What had this stranger done to warrant having such things around his wrists? It must have been a terrible crime, she decided.

Kneeling in the snow at his side, Thorva tried to fathom why she had been guided here. The gods had clearly brought her here—just as they had directed her in the past—but why? The man was still unconscious, if not yet dead. Had she been brought here to save him? Or was it what he brought with him that was important?

Thorva’s gaze returned to the stranger’s bonds. Making her decision, she reached toward one of them.

Before she had even touched the pale stone, her fingertips began to tingle.

The man’s eyes snapped suddenly open.

Thorva jerked back in shock, but she was too slow. The man tore off one of his gloves and grabbed her by the arm, and even as Thorva tried to summon her gods-given power, she felt it ripped out of her, forcibly drained from the core of her being. Her body was stricken with a sudden, incapacitating coldness—a sensation she had not felt in years—and she fell, unable to breathe, unable to move, unable to do anything.

As the cold took her, she dimly registered color returning to the stranger’s face, as if he were suddenly being warmed by a hearth.

A hint of a smile curled his lips.

“Thank you,” he said.

Then he released his grip, and Thorva fell back into the snow with a gasp, empty, and drained.

Vrynna cursed as she saw the shamanka fall, and kicked her drüvask forward.

“With me!” she roared, and the rest of the raiding party lurched into motion. The ground shook beneath their thundering charge, the sound akin to an avalanche.

The outsider was kneeling alongside the Sister of Frost as the Winter’s Claw powered through the snow toward him. Curiously, she saw the man shrug off his fur coat and drape it over the fallen shamanka, the gesture almost tender.

He stood to face the earth-shaking approach of the Winter’s Claw, dragging his chains behind him. Vrynna tightened her grip on her spear.

Seeing the force bearing down on him, the stranger backed away from the fallen shamanka, who lay unmoving and pale upon the snow. He held his hands up to show he bore no weapon, but that didn’t matter to Vrynna. She had killed unarmed enemies in the past.

Without having to give the signal, Vrynna’s warriors fanned out wide to encircle him, cutting off any chance of escape. Wisely, he didn’t try to run. After all, there was nowhere to run to.

He turned on the spot, like the weakest of the herd, isolated by wolves. His gaze darted between the Freljordians arrayed against him. He was wary, yet he showed no sign of fear, which Vrynna could respect, at least.

Having taken off his coat, the outsider’s muscular arms were bare to the elements, but he appeared not to feel the cold at all.

Curious, thought Vrynna.

He was a tall man but he was hunched slightly, the weight of the massive shackles bound to his arms clearly pulling on him.

“See to the Sister,” she ordered, not taking her eyes off the stranger.

The stranger faced her, as one of the raiders slid from his saddle and moved to the shamanka’s side.

“I am Vrynna,” she declared. “Scarmother of the Winter’s Claw. Shieldbreaker. Woebringer. I am the Drüvask’s Howl. Who are you, and why are you here?”

The man cocked his head to one side, responding in a tongue she could not comprehend. Vrynna cursed.

“You don’t understand me, do you?”

Again the man gave her a quizzical look.

“Sylas,” he replied, tapping his chest.

“Sylas?” Vrynna repeated. “That’s your name, Sylas?”

The man simply repeated the word, tapping his chest again, and giving her a rakish smile.

The scarmother muttered under her breath. She glanced over to the shamanka, lying lifeless and pale upon the snow. One of Vrynna’s warriors knelt over Thorva, lowering his head to her chest to see if she was breathing.

“Is she dead?” she called.

“She’s half frozen, but she lives,” came the reply. “At least for now.”

The Freljordian warriors muttered under their breaths. Half frozen? It was known that the Sister of Frost was inured to the cold, claimed to be a gift of the old gods… but now she was freezing, and this stranger to the Freljord, Sylas, stood before them, his skin bare?

Vrynna frowned, considering her options. She didn’t put much faith in anything but steel, fire, and blood, but she knew her warriors—particularly Brokvar—would likely see this as some kind of omen.

“This is a waste of time,” she muttered.

Making her decision, she tightened her grip on her spear,and nudged her mount forward. The man, Sylas, raised a hand and yelled something in his weak, southerner’s tongue, but she ignored him. She would kill this fool, and be on her way.

“Let me do it,” growled Brokvar, riding at the scarmother’s side.

Vrynna’s brow raised.

“He did this to the revered sister,” Brokvar answered her silent question, stabbing a meaty finger toward the fallen shamanka. “It would be my honor to punish him, beneath the eyes of the gods.”

The outsider looked between Vrynna and Brokvar. Did he have any understanding that his fate was about to be determined?

Vrynna shrugged. “He’s yours.”

Brokvar dropped off his mount, rose to his full, towering height. The man, Sylas, was not small, but Brokvar made him look it. The Iceborn unsheathed Winter’s-Wail from the scabbard across his back, and began to walk grimly toward the outsider.

The last time Thorva had truly felt the cold had been when she was a child, not even six winters of age.

She had chased a snow hare out onto a frozen lake, laughing as she went. She had not realized the ice beneath her was so thin until the awful cracking sound, right before it gave way. With a strangled cry, she plunged into the icy, black depths. Such was the shocking suddenness of the bone-chilling cold that all the air was driven from her lungs, and her limbs instantly seized up, stiffening in agonizing cramps.

She’d been dead for long minutes before she was finally hauled out from under the ice and the tribe’s shaman breathed life back into her. She first manifested her gods-given power that night.

“Sometimes, when a person is brought back from the Realm Beyond, they return changed,” the shaman explained, shrugging. “The gods, in their inscrutable wisdom, have blessed you.”

In the days that followed, she had found herself impervious to cold, able to walk through freezing blizzards bare-skinned, with no ill effect.

Now, once again she was that scared little girl she’d been, sinking slowly as the hole in the ice above got further and further away… only this time she was staring up at the sky, unblinking.

Numb and breathless, Thorva lay on the ground, hearing nothing, feeling nothing. The cold infused her. It was her.

Was this the reason she had been brought here? To give her life to the outsider, that he may fulfill whatever it was the gods had decreed?

Nevertheless, an ineffable fear slowed her descent into oblivion.

Even if it were the gods’ will for her to die in the outsider’s place, Thorva knew in her heart that Vrynna would not let him live… and so, she began to fight back toward the surface.

Brokvar Ironfist went straight for the killing blow, charging forward, Winter’s-Wail hissing through the air and trailing icy fog in its wake.

That blow would have split an ice-troll in half had it landed, but the outsider was surprisingly quick given he was weighed down by restraints. He darted back from the lethal strike and whipped his chains around in a whirling arc. They swung passed Brokvar’s face, barely missing the Iceborn warrior as he snarled in fury.

Still, he didn’t reel back, as perhaps the outsider had expected. He was as tough as the mountains and was exceptionally fast for such a big man. He lashed out, striking his opponent across the side of the head with a powerful backhand punch, and Vrynna winced as the smaller man was sent flying.

The outsider struggled to pick himself off the ground as the Iceborn stalked toward him, but finally regained his footing. In truth, Vrynna was impressed that he was able to get up at all. Still, he merely prolonged the inevitable outcome.

His face set in grim resolve, Brokvar closed in for the kill.

Sylas’ gaze narrowed as he focused on the barbarian’s weapon.

The pale ice shard in its hilt was glowing brightly, and crackling hoarfrost covered the blade.

The magic that chunk of ice exuded was unlike anything Sylas had encountered before. It was primal, dangerous, and enfettered. Sylas could feel it on his skin, a frisson of power that was almost intoxicating.

The woman’s power had revived him, driving the cold from his limbs and the blackness from his fingers, but this was a power far older. If he could just get his hands on it…

With a roar, Sylas stepped forward to meet the Freljordian.

The outsider lashed at Brokvar, swinging his chains around in a flurry of arcs. The Iceborn was struck across his head, one chain from each side. The heavy links whipped around, and with a wrench, the Iceborn’s helmet was torn off.

Brokvar shook his long hair loose, spat blood into the snow, and continued his advance.

The chains came around at him again, but the massive warrior was ready this time. He avoided the first of the strikes, before stepping forward and lifting one arm, letting the chain whip around his massive forearm. Then he grabbed the metal links in his vice-like grip, and yanked the smaller man toward him, straight into a swinging elbow.

The blow crumpled the man, and he fell at Brokvar’s feet. The Iceborn towered over him, Winter’s-Wail raised to deliver the killing blow.

“Wait! Do not kill him!” came a shout, and Brokvar paused.

Vrynna whipped her head around, scowling, to see the Sister of Frost, Thorva, rising unsteadily to her feet. She was deathly pale, and her lips blue, but she stomped forward, leaning heavily on her staff of office.

“What madness is this?” Vrynna snarled.

“Not madness,” Thorva said, leaning heavily upon her staff of office. “It is the will of the gods.”

The giant barbarian was momentarily distracted, a look of confusion on his brutish face, and Sylas saw his chance.

Rising to a knee, he lashed out with one of his chains. It whipped around the blade of his opponent, and with a sharp tug, he tore it from the man’s grasp.

It landed in the snow nearby, and Sylas leapt upon it, eagerly.

Grinning, he picked up the broadsword… and agony seared through him.

Vrynna shook her head at the fool. Only an Iceborn could hold a True Ice weapon. For anyone else, it was a death sentence.

The outsider released Winter’s-Wail, roaring as the cold shot up his arm. He dropped to his knees, clutching his arm, even as it began to freeze. The killing power of the True Ice began at his hand, but was steadily working its way down his arm, toward his heart.

“The gods wanted this?” Vrynna scoffed, gesturing at the outsider.

The shamanka scowled, but said nothing.

“But then, the gods are nothing if not fickle and cruel,” added Vrynna, shrugging. “Perhaps they simply wanted him to suffer?”

Brokvar retrieved Winter’s-Wail, hefting it without harm. The outsider stared up at him, anguish and confusion written upon his face as the lethal power of the True Ice consumed him.

“Put him out of his misery,” ordered Vrynna.

Brokvar’s iron gaze shifted to the shamanka, looking for her approval. Anger surged within Vrynna.

“If the gods want him saved, then they can intervene,” she snapped.

Thorva served and venerated the old gods of the Freljord, but she did not claim to know their will. Nor had she often witnessed them intervene directly in mortal matters.

And yet, it seemed impossible that what happened next was purely coincidental.

The outsider was lying on the snowpack, shivering and convulsing. The True Ice had almost claimed him, but he continued to fight it, reaching out one shuddering hand toward the Iceborn warrior.

Thorva knew what the Demacian was capable of, how he had siphoned her power with but one brief touch. She could have warned the Iceborn veteran… but she did not.

Sylas was dying, but even in death his will to keep fighting was strong.

In desperation, he reached out toward the towering barbarian looming above him. He grabbed hold of the warrior’s boot, but the barbarian kicked his clawing hand away.

The bearded giant looked down at him piteously, as one would a wretched dog in the street. It was the same way the nobility looked down on the lesser-born in Demacia, and Sylas’ anger surged.

That anger fueled him, and with a last burst of his dying strength, he sprang off the ground and grasped the Freljordian giant around the throat. Ancient, raw, elemental magic instantly began to infuse him.

Sylas may have been unable to grasp the Freljordian ice-weapon, but he could still draw from its power… using the barbarian’s flesh as its conduit.

It took no more than a moment.

The barbarian staggered back, unsure what had just happened. Sylas smiled, and his eyes began to glow with icy-pale light.

He turned his attention to his frozen arm, holding it before him. With a surge of his newfound power, he made the ice reverse its direction. It crept back down his arm, and then was gone, leaving his flesh unharmed.

Then he turned his attention to the warrior standing aghast before him.

“Now then,” he said. “Where were we?”

Brokvar stepped back away from the outsider, gaping in wonder.

“What is he?” snarled Vrynna. “Iceborn?”

“No,” Thorva interjected, eyes blazing with faith. “He is something else…”

Vrynna had seen enough. In one smooth, well-practiced motion she reversed her grip on her spear, and standing in the saddle, hurled it at the stranger, putting all her might and weight behind it.

It hurtled straight toward him, but the man thrust a hand out, fingers splayed, and the ground before him erupted. Amid a grinding series of cracks, a protective wall of towering ice-spikes surged up from below. Vrynna’s spear slammed deep into the ice, but could not penetrate it. It was left shuddering in place, embedded a solid foot into the barrier, and leaving the outsider completely unharmed.

Vrynna gaped at the magical barrier, even as it collapsed a moment later, falling as quickly as it had appeared.

The outsider stood revealed, laughing and looking in wonder at his hands, now rimmed with frost and radiating pale blue light, like the underside of an iceberg. He looked up at Vrynna, frozen fog emanating from his eyes, and began to gather the primal, frozen power within him once more. A spinning orb of magic, like a self-contained blizzard, began to form between his hands.

The Winter’s Claw fingered their weapons uneasily, unsure of themselves in the face of what was clearly Freljordian magic.

Thorva called out something then, though the words made no sense to Vrynna. She glanced at the shamanka in surprise.

She spoke the outsider’s tongue?

There was much about the Sister of Frost that she did not know, it seemed, and her distrust deepened.

The shamanka and the stranger spoke for a time, while Vrynna watched on, gritting her teeth.

“What does the outsider say?” she snapped, finally losing patience.

“He says we share a common enemy,” Thorva explained. “He says we can help each other.”

Vrynna frowned. “Who? The Avarosans? We raid them, as we always have, but we are not at war.”

“I believe he means his own people. The Demacians, across the mountains.”

“He is a traitor, then?” Vrynna said, “Why would we trust one who would betray his own?”

“The mother of scars would know how you would aid our tribe,” Thorva said, addressing the outsider in his own tongue. “Make your offer, else your soul will journey to the Beyond, here and now.”

Sylas gave his answer, speaking directly to Vrynna. Thorva watched him carefully as he spoke, asking several times for clarifications of words she did not immediately understand.

“He says he knows hidden paths into his homelands, paths known only to him,” said Thorva. “He speaks of the vast riches there, waiting to be claimed. Fields untouched by snow and filled with fat cattle, streets that flow with gold and silver.”

The warriors of the Winter’s Claw smiled and laughed among themselves at her words, and even Vrynna’s eyes lit up. They lived a harsh existence, making the promise of easy pickings a tempting one.

But still some doubt lingered.

“How do we know he would not lead us into a trap?” challenged Vrynna. “We cannot trust him. Better to kill him, here and now, and not be led astray by his golden tongue.”

“He…” Thorva began, picking her lie carefully. “He says he had a vision. A dream that came to him, of three Freljordian sisters. It was they who urged him to come here.”

“The Three!” breathed Brokvar in reverence. “He speaks of Avarosa, Serylda, and Lissandra!”

The other Winter’s Claw warriors murmured in surprise and awe, many of them touching holy totems hanging around their necks.

The Three Sisters were legends, the greatest and most honored warriors of the Freljord. They were the first of the Iceborn, and had lived in the age of heroes, long ago. Across much of the frozen north, they had come to be regarded as chosen ones, and many invoked their wisdom in times of strife, or begged their favor before battle.

Vrynna glared, regarding Thorva sourly. Did the scarmother suspect her lie?

Seeing Brokvar’s rapturous wonder spread through the other gathered warriors, however, she realized it didn’t matter. Thorva had known Vrynna’s Iceborn champion would latch on to those words. That they would inspire his awe and his faith, and that his influence among the other warriors was strong. They would never allow the outsider to be killed out of hand now, no matter what order Vrynna gave.

She allowed herself a slight smile of victory, though she was careful not to let Vrynna see it as she considered the outsider.

It was the gods’ will that this one lived, Thorva felt certain of it. She felt no guilt for lying to ensure that happened.

“He must prove himself before we would even consider trusting him.”

“A wise move, scarmother,” nodded Thorva. “What do you suggest?”

“He will come with us on our raid,” declared Vrynna. “If he fights well, and makes a good account of himself, then perhaps we will hear more of what he proposes. More about these hidden paths into Demacia. But he will be your responsibility. It will be up to you to control him, and if he turns on us, it will be on your head.”

Thorva nodded, and turned to the outsider.

“Fight with us. Prove to the mother of scars your worth,” she said. “Fight strong and you may live to have your alliance.”

Those final words elicited a broad smile from the outsider.

Thorva appraised him, giving him a look from head to toe. He was handsome for a southerner. A little lean for her tastes, but he was clever, and there was power in him.

She leveled a finger at him.

“But never touch me again,” she warned.

The outsider smiled wryly.

“Not without your permission,” he replied, and Thorva turned away so he did not see her smile.

“What does he say?” demanded Vrynna.

“He agrees to your terms, scarmother,” called Thorva.

“Good. Then let us move,” said Vrynna. “We raid.”

“I can’t do it.”

The words thickened Kegan’s tongue, and almost crashed against the cage of his teeth, but he forced them past his lips.

“Master. I can’t do it.”

Defeat gave him a chance to catch his breath. Who knew failure could be so exhausting? In that moment, he looked for sympathy in the older man’s eyes—to his disgust, he saw it right there, as bare as the cloudless sky.

When Kegan’s master spoke, it was with the lilting flow of faraway lands. His was an accent rarely carried by these northern winds. “It is not a matter of whether you can,” he said. “Only that you must.”

The older man clicked his fingers. With a purple flash, the bundle of deadwood flared to life; a campfire born in a single moment of willpower.

Kegan turned from the fire and spat into the snow. They were words he’d heard before, and they were as useless now as they always were.

“You make it seem so easy.”

His master shrugged, as if even that half-hearted accusation needed a moment’s thought before replying. “It is simple, perhaps. Not easy. The two aren’t always the same thing.”

“But there has to be another way…” Kegan muttered, unconsciously touching his fingertips to the burn-scars blighting his cheek. Even as he said it, he found himself believing it. It had to be true. It wouldn’t always be like this. It couldn’t always be like this.

“Why?” His master looked at him with unconcealed curiosity in the light of his eyes. “Why must there be another way? Because you continue to fail at this one?”

Kegan grunted. “Answering questions with questions is a coward’s way of speaking.”

His master raised one dark eyebrow. “And there it is. The wisdom of a barbarian who cannot yet read, or count past the number of fingers on his hands.”

The tension faded as the two of them shared a grim smile. They warmed broth, sipping it from ivory cups as their campfire cast them in a flickering amber glow. Above them—above the tundra for hundreds of miles around—the sky rippled with light.

Kegan watched the heavens’ familiar performance, the gauzy radiance caressing the moon and the stars that cradled it. For all that he loathed this land, there was beauty here in abundance, if a man knew where to look.

Sometimes that was as simple as looking up.

“The spirits dance wildly tonight,” he said.

His master tilted his unnatural gaze skyward. “The aurora? That is not the work of spirits—only the action of solar winds on the upper reaches of…”

Kegan stared at him.

His master trailed off, and awkwardly cleared his throat. “Never mind.”

Silence returned to haunt them. Kegan drew the knife from his belt, setting to work on a sliver of unburnt wood. He carved with easy strokes. Hands that had set fires and ended lives now turned to a far more peaceful purpose.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the sorcerer was watching him.

“I want you to breathe in,” the older man said.

The blade still scraped over the bark. “I’m breathing now. I’m always breathing.”

“Please,” his master said, with an edge of impatience, “do not be so obtuse.”

“So what?”

“Obtuse. It means… Well, never mind what it means. I want you to breathe in, and hold it as long as you can.”

“Why?”

His master exhaled something like a sigh.

“Fine,” Kegan agreed, tossing the branch into the fire and sheathing his bone-handled knife once more. “Fine, fine, fine.”

He took a deep breath, swelling the muscles of his chest and shoulders. Silenced as he held his breath, he looked to his master for whatever would come next.

“You do not create the air you breathe,” the sorcerer said. “You draw it inside you, letting it sustain you. You use it as your body requires, and then release it as you exhale. It is never yours. You are just a vessel for it. You breathe in, you breathe out. You are a channel through which air flows.”

Kegan made to release his breath, though his master shook his head.

“No. Not yet. Feel the air in your lungs, Kegan. Feel it pushing at the cage of your body. Feel it straining to escape.”

The young barbarian’s features were flushing red. His eyes asked the question his mouth could not.

“No,” the sorcerer answered. He gestured to Kegan with a discoloured hand. “Keep holding.”

When Kegan’s endurance finally gave out, defiance took over, buying him more time. When even his defiance began to ebb with the pain of his quivering chest, naked stubbornness took control. He glared daggers at his master, trembling with the effort, knowing this was surely a test—knowing he had to prove something, without knowing just what it might be.

Greyness misted the edge of his vision. His pulse was rhythmic thunder in his ears. All the while his master looked on, saying nothing.

Finally, his breath burst back into the chill evening air, and Kegan sagged, gasping, as he recovered. He was a wolf in that moment, a wild animal baring his teeth at the world around him, offering a threat to any that might attack in his moment of weakness.

His master watched this, too.

“I was beginning to wonder if you would actually let yourself pass out,” he murmured.

Kegan grinned, and pounded a fist against his chest, wordlessly proud of how long he’d held out.

“Therein lies the problem,” his master observed, reading his posture. “I told you the air was not yours, yet you are thrilled with yourself for how long you kept it inside you. It is the same with magic. You want it, believing it can be owned. You cling to it, forgetting that you are merely a channel through which it passes. You choke it in your heart, and in your hands. And so the magic is strangled in your grip, because you see it as something to bind to your will. It is not, and never will be. It is like air. You must draw in what exists around you, use it for a moment, then let it free.”

The two of them—student and master, barbarian and sorcerer—fell silent again. The wind howled through the canyons to the south, bringing a keening cry on the breeze.

Kegan eyed the older man suspiciously. “So… why didn’t you just say all that? Why make me hold my breath?”

“I have said all of that before. Several dozen times, in several dozen ways. I hoped a practical element to the lesson might aid your comprehension.”

Kegan snorted, then glared into the fire.

“Master. Something’s been preying on my mind of late.”

The sorcerer chuckled to himself and patted the rolled, bound parchment leashed to his back. “No, Kegan. I am not letting you read this.”

The young tribesman grinned, though his stare was devoid of mirth. “That’s not what I wanted to ask,” he said. “What if I’m not a bad student? What if you’re just a bad teacher?”

His master stared into the flames, his weary eyes reflecting the dancing firelight.

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” he replied.

“You said something the other day,” the barbarian said as he drew alongside his master. “Something that sounded like a lie.”

The sorcerer turned slightly, his features shadowed by his hood. “I am many things,” said the older man, “and not all of them are virtuous. But I am not a liar.”

Kegan grunted what may or may not have been an apology. “Perhaps not a lie, then. More like… a fable.”

The sorcerer was watching him as they walked. “Go on.”

“That place. That empire. The kingdom you said was destroyed lifetimes ago.”

“Shurima? What of it?”

“You said it lay in a land never touched by frost, or rimed by ice.” Kegan grinned as if sharing a joke. “I’m not as gullible as you believe I am, master.”

The sorcerer found himself dragged out of his bleakness by the barbarian’s curiosity. He switched the burden of his backpack to his other shoulder, unable to hide a small smile.

“That was no lie.” He stopped walking, turning to point southward. “Far, far to the south, many hundreds of days’ walk, and across another ocean, there lies a land where…”

How does one explain the desert to a man that knows only winter? he thought. How does one explain sand to a man that knows nothing but ice?

“…a land where the earth is hot dust, and where snow is utterly unknown. The sun beats down without mercy. Even rain is rare. The ground thirsts for it, day after day.”

Kegan was staring at him again. He had that look in his pale eyes, the one that said he didn’t dare trust what was being told, in case it was some trick to make him look foolish. The sorcerer had seen that look in the eyes of many, in his time—lonely children and fragile adults alike.

“A place that has never felt Anivia’s touch,” Kegan murmured. “But is the world really that large, that a man can walk for so long and still not see its end?”

“It is the truth. There are whole lands elsewhere in the world that are not frozen. In time, you will learn that there are few places as cold as the Freljord.”

The conversation was stilted for the rest of the day’s journey, and when they made camp, there seemed little more to say. Even so, the young barbarian persevered. He looked across the campfire, to where his master sat cross-legged in sullen introspection.

“Shouldn’t you be teaching me something?”

The sorcerer raised an eyebrow. “Should I?”

He always had a look about him that suggested his apprentice was interrupting him just by being alive. They’d been together for a few weeks now. Kegan was growing used to it. The youth dragged his hands through dirty hair, brushing his mother’s ivory trinkets from his face. He muttered something that would, with imagination, pass for an agreement.

When the sorcerer still refused to answer, he pressed harder.

“So, will we get to... wherever it is we’re going, today?”

His master regarded him carefully. “No. We will not reach our destination for several weeks.”

The sorcerer did not seem to be jesting.

“And I have given more thought to the difficulties you suffer in controlling your gifts,” he added, flatly.

Kegan wasn’t sure what to say. Sometimes silence was the only way to avoid looking ignorant or impatient, so he tried that. It seemed to work, for the sorcerer continued.

“You have some talent, true enough. The ability is in your blood. Now you must stop perceiving magic as an adversarial, external force. It need not be harnessed, merely… nudged. I have watched you. When you reach out to wield it, you seek to fashion it to your will. You want control.”

Kegan was getting frustrated now. “But that’s how magic works. That’s what my mother always did. She wanted it to do something, so she made it happen.”

The sorcerer suppressed a wince of irritation. “You don’t need to make magic happen. Magic exists in the world. The raw stuff of creation is all around us. You do not need to clutch it, and bend it to your needs. You can just… encourage it. Direct it along the path you would prefer it to take.”

As he spoke, he moved his hands as if shaping a ball of clay. A faint chime sounded in the empty air, holding to its eternal, perfect note. Misty energies snaked between his fingers, binding to one another in slow lashes. Several of them tendriled out from the sphere to curl around his discolored hands, seething and darkly organic.

“There will always be those that study magic with rigid intent, mapping the ways one can exert their will on the primal forces. And, clumsy as it is, it will work. Slowly, and with limited results. But you don’t need to behave so crudely, Kegan. I am not shaping these energies into a sphere. I’m merely encouraging them to form one. Do you understand?”

“I see,” Kegan admitted, “but that’s not the same as understanding.”

The sorcerer nodded, sharing a small smile. Evidently his apprentice had finally uttered something worthwhile.

“Some men and women, souls of iron discipline or limited imagination, will codify the magical energy that flows between realms. They will manipulate it, and bind it, however they are able. They are looking at sunlight through a crack in the wall, marveling at how it bleeds into their dark chambers. Instead, they could just go outside, and marvel in the blinding light of day.” He sighed pointedly. “Your mother was one such mage, Kegan. Through repetitive ritual and traditional concoctions, she dabbled in minor magics. But all she was doing—all any of them can do with their rituals and talismans and spell books—is create a barrier between themselves and the purer forces at play.”

Kegan watched the sphere ripple and revolve, not bound within the sorcerer’s touch at all; constantly overlapping it, or threatening to roll free.

“Here is the secret, young barbarian.”

Their eyes met in that moment; pale and human, reflected against shimmering and… whatever his master really was.

“I’m listening,” Kegan said, softer than he intended. He’d not wanted to appear ignorant and awed, especially since he knew he was both.

“Magic wants to be used,” said the sorcerer. “It is all around us, emanating from the first fragments of creation. It wants to be wielded. And that is the true challenge on the path we both walk. When you realize what the magic wants, how eager it is… Well, then the difficulty isn’t how to begin wielding it. It’s knowing when to stop.”

The sorcerer opened his hands, gently nudging the sphere of cascading forces towards his apprentice. The barbarian cautiously reached out to welcome it, only for it to burst the moment his fingers grazed its surface. The trails of mist thinned and faded away. The ringing chime grew fainter, then altogether silent.

“You will learn,” the sorcerer promised. “Patience and humility are the hardest lessons, but they are all you will ever need.”

Kegan nodded, though not at once, and not without a sliver of doubt.

The sorcerer didn’t sleep that night. He lay awake, wrapped in a crude blanket of furs, staring up at the aurora undulating across the night sky. On the other side of the banked fire, the barbarian snored.

Doubtlessly dreaming the dreams of the unburdened, thought the sorcerer.

No. That was unfair. Kegan was a brute, yes, but he was a youth roughly hewn from a land of endless hardship. The Freljord bred souls whose instinct was forever focused on survival above all else. Beasts with iron hides and spear-length fangs stalked the wilds. Raiders from rival villages shed blood all along the icy coasts. Their winter had lasted a hundred lifetimes. These people grew in a land where writing and artistry were luxuries; where the reading of books was an unimaginable myth, and lore was told and retold down the generations in whispered stories by weary elders and tribal shamans.

And Kegan, for all his blunt stubbornness, was far from unburdened.

Is it a mistake, bringing him with me? Was this a moment of mercy, or a moment of weakness?

There seemed no answer to that.

I could have left him. As soon as the thought occurred, the rest of it rose unbidden, treacherously swift. And he would not be the first I had abandoned...

The sorcerer looked through the haze of heat that shimmered above the faded fire, and watched the barbarian sleep. The young man’s lip twitched, with an answering flicker of his fingers.

“I should wonder what you dream of, Kegan Rodhe,” the sorcerer whispered. “What ghosts of fading memory reach out to reclaim you?

Night after night, in his dreams, Kegan walked the paths of his past. Before meeting the sorcerer, he had been an exile, wandering the frozen wastes alone, warmed only by his brash refusal to die.

And before that? A brawler. A failed shaman. A son to a distant mother.

He was still young by any standard beyond that of the Freljord, with scarcely the chill of nineteen winters in his bones. He had lived hard, by his wits and the edge of his blade, winning a cut of renown and more than his fair share of indignity.

Night after night, in his dreams, he was a ragged wanderer lost in the howling white storm once more, slowly freezing to death in the snow. He was a healer, scrabbling over loose rocks in the rain, seeking the flashes of color that betrayed rare herbs amid the undergrowth. He was a boy crouched in his mother’s cave, in that place that was a sanctuary from the world but never from her gaze, laden with misgivings.

And night after night, in his dreams, Rygann’s Reach burned again.

He was seven years old when he learned the truth of his blood. His mother crouched before him, turning his face in her hands and looking over the scrapes and bruises marking his skin. He felt an uneasy flicker of surprise, for she rarely touched him.

“Who did this to you?” she asked, and as he was drawing breath to answer her, she spoke over him with words he was far more used to hearing. “What did you do? What did you do wrong, to earn this punishment?”

She moved away before he could reply.

He trembled in the wake of her touch on his skin, unused to the contact, fearing and cherishing that moment of awkward closeness. “Just wrestling, mother. In the village all the boys wrestle. And the girls too.”

She regarded him with a skeptical eye. “You didn’t get those marks from wrestling, Kegan,” she muttered. “I’m not a fool.”

“There was a fight after the wrestling.” He wiped his nose on his ragged sleeve, smearing away a half-dried scab. “Some of the other boys didn’t like me winning. They got angry.”

His mother was a thin woman—frail in a land that devoured the weak. She was old before her time, a victim of unspoken sorrows and the isolation brought about by her talents. Even at seven, Kegan knew all of this.

He was a perceptive child. This was the advantage of having a mage for a mother.

As he looked up at her, framed as she was by the mouth of the cave they called home, he saw a softness in her eyes that was as unfamiliar as the touch on his face had been a moment before. He thought she might sink back to her knees before him and draw him into an embrace, and the thought terrified him as much as he yearned for it.

Instead, her dark eyes frosted over.

“What have I told you about upsetting the other children? You’ll just make our lives even harder if the village hates you, Kegan.”

“But they started it.”

She stopped, half-turned, and looked back down at him. Her expression was as dark and cold as her eyes. The younger gaze lifted to meet hers was pale green, like she so often told him his father’s had been.

“And you started it all the other times. Your temper, Kegan…”

“No, I didn’t,” the boy lied. “Not every time, at least.”

His mother moved further back into the cave, crouching by the firepit, stirring the watery broth of boiled elnük fat that would serve as their dinner for the next three nights. “There’s magic in our blood. In our bones. In our breath. We have to be careful, in ways other people don’t.”

“But—”

“You shouldn’t cause trouble in the village. We already live here on their sufferance. Old Rygann has been good to us, letting us stay here.”

Instinct moved Kegan’s mouth before he had time to think. “We live in a cave in the rocks, far from the village,” he said. “You should stop healing them if they’re so bad to us. We should leave.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Kegan. I heal because I have the power to do it, and we stay because we have to stay.” She nodded to the hillside where the trees were blackened by the night, and silvered by the moon. “We’d die out there, where the woods become ice and snow, all the way to the world’s end. Let them say whatever they want to say. Don’t stir up trouble. Don’t stir up the magic in your blood.”

But the boy stood still at the rim of the cave. “If they say bad things about me, or they fight me… I’ll fight back. I’m not a coward like you.”

This night would become a memory branded forever into his mind because of what came next. For the first time, he didn’t bow his head and promise to obey her. Instead, he clenched his little fists, and narrowed his eyes.

In the silence that stretched between mother and son, he expected a slap—one of her forceless cracks against his cheek that would somehow sting for about an hour afterwards—or maybe yet more weeping. His mother cried a lot, quiet and alone, long into the night when she thought he was asleep.

But this time, there was something new in her eyes. Something fearful.

“You are your father’s son.” The words were calm and measured, and somehow all the worse for it. “His eyes, always looking at me. His crime, always there to remind me. And now his words, his spite, thrown in my face.”

The boy gazed up at her in awed, childish fury. “Is that why you hate me?”

She hesitated before answering, and that meant more than any answer ever could. It was that hesitation he never forgot, even years later, long after her skinny bones were naught but ash and dust on a cooling funeral pyre.

He was thirteen when he first saw Zvanna. She came to Rygann’s Reach with two dozen others, the survivors of a nomadic clan that had dwindled in the wilds over the course of a generation. Rather than take to raiding like so many others, they settled in the Reach, bringing fresh blood, skills, and spears to the people of the prosperous fishing village.

Kegan met her one day in the half-light of the setting sun. He was picking heather and herbs in the southern hills, stripping the stems of thorns before stuffing them into his stag-hide satchel. It was a slow task when done right, and Kegan’s fingers were pin-pricked in a hundred places from his haste.

At one point he looked up, and there she was.

He stopped working. He rose to his feet, brushing dirt from his sore hands, with no idea how curiosity and surprise looked like suspicion on his otherwise fine features. You would be handsome, his mother had once said, if you could stop glaring at the world as if you want to avenge yourself upon it.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She flinched at the question, and even to his own ears he sounded abrupt.

“I mean, you’re one of the newcomers. I know that. What’s your name? What are you doing out here? Are you lost?”

The questions rained on the girl like flung stones. She was older than him, though by no more than a year or two. Willowy, wide-eyed, practically drowning in her heavy furs, she stared back at him as she spoke. She had the voice of a mouse.

“Are you the healer’s boy?”

He smiled, showing all teeth and no humour. For the first time in years, he felt the ache of knowing that they talked ill of him in the village. Here was someone new to his world, and it was someone who had already heard a hundred dark things about him.

“Kegan,” he replied. He swallowed, and sought to soften his words. “Yes, I’m the healer’s boy,” he added with a nod. “Who are you?”

“Zvanna. Can you come? My father is sick.”

Kegan’s heart sank. He found himself pitching his voice lower, as if she were a grazing beast he didn’t want to frighten away.

“I’m not a healer. Not like my mother.” The confession was like having a tooth pulled. “I just help her.”

“She’s on her way to the village,” the girl said. “She told me to find you. You have the herbs she needs.”

Kegan cursed as he buckled his bag into place. He started towards her, moving lightly over the dark earth and scree. “I’ll come now. Who’s your father? What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s a sailmaker,” Zvanna replied, leading the way back to the Reach. “He can’t eat or drink. His stomach hurts.”

“My mother will know what to do.” Kegan spoke in the tones of absolute confidence as he followed her across the hillside, descending towards the village. Inwardly, he felt a stab every time she glanced back at him, and he wondered just what she’d heard from the other children of the village.

He didn’t have to wonder for long. She spoke gently, without judgement.

“Old Rygann said you’re a raider’s son. A reaver-bastard.”

Gloom was taking hold around them with the setting of the sun. Kegan showed no emotion at all. “Old Rygann said the truth.”

“Does that really make you bad luck? Like the legends say?”

“Depends which legends you believe…” Kegan considered that a cunning enough answer, but she twisted it back at him a moment later.

“Which legends do you believe?” she asked, looking over her shoulder. He met her eyes in the twilight, and felt the force of her gentle gaze like an axe to the gut.

None of them, he thought. They’re all fears held by foolish men and women, afraid of true magic.

“I don’t know,” he said.

She had no response for that. She did, however, have another question.

“If your mother is a healer, why aren’t you?”

Because the magic doesn’t work for me, he almost said aloud, but thought better of it. “Because I want to be a warrior.”

Zvanna kept ahead of him, her tread light across the icy rocks. “But there are no warriors here. Only hunters.”

“Well. I want to be a warrior.”

“People need healers more than warriors,” she pointed out.

“Oh?” Kegan spat into the undergrowth. “Then why do shamans have no friends?”

He knew the answer to that. He’d heard it enough. People are frightened of me, his mother always said.

But Zvanna had a different answer.

“If you help my father, I’ll be your friend.”

He was sixteen when he broke Erach’s jaw. Sixteen, and already possessing a man’s size and muscle. Sixteen, and all too familiar when it came to proving a point with his fists. His mother warned him about it, time and again, and now Zvanna did the same.

“Your temper, Kegan…” she would say, in the same tone as his mother.

In his sixteenth year, the solstice celebration was a riotous affair, a louder and brighter celebration than usual with the arrival of a merchant caravan and three string musicians from Valar’s Hollow, far to the south-west. Oathings were made by the shore, and promises of eternal love spoken ardently, foolishly, and frequently. Young warriors fire-danced to impress the unwed locals watching from the sides. Hearts were broken and mended, grudges forged and settled. Fights broke out over betrothals, over property, over matters of honour. The abundance of drink only added to the atmosphere of revelry.

Many were the regrets that came with the pale, winter’s dawn, when the clarity of the unmelting snows returned through fading hangovers.

But the fight between Kegan and Erach was like no other.

Bathed in sweat from the fire-dance, Kegan looked for Zvanna by the shoreline. Had she seen him perform? Had she watched him leave the other young men of the village panting, unable to keep up with his wild leaps?

His mother was a stick-thin wraith in her sealskin cloak. Her hair was ragged, with the trinkets and talismans of bone tied into the unwashed strands resting against her cheeks. She gripped his wrist. The solstice was one of the few nights their presence was tolerated in the village, and his mother had made the journey with him.

“Where’s Zvanna?” he asked her.

“Kegan,” she warned him as she held his wrist. “I want you to be calm.”

The heat of the flames and the sweat on his skin no longer existed. His blood was frost. His bones were ice.

“Where’s Zvanna?” he asked again, this time in a growl.

His mother started to explain, but he didn’t need her to. Somehow, he knew. Perhaps it was nothing more than a flash of intuition through his dawning temper. Or perhaps it was—as the sorcerer would later say—a flicker of insight from his latent magical gifts.

Whatever the truth, he shoved his mother aside. He went down to the waves where young couples stood with their families, garlanded by winter flowers, swearing oaths to stay loyal and loving for the rest of their lives.

Murmurs started up as he drew near. He ignored them. They became objections as he forced his way through the crowd, and he ignored those, too.

He wasn’t too late. That was what mattered. There was still time.

“Zvanna!”

All eyes turned to him, though hers was the only gaze that mattered. He saw the joy die in her eyes as she recognised the look upon his face. The crown of white winter blossoms was at odds with her black hair. He wanted to rip it from her head.

The young man at her side moved protectively in front of her, but she eased him aside to confront Kegan herself.

“Don’t do this, Kegan. My father arranged it. I could have refused, if I wanted to. Please don’t do this. Not now.”

“But you’re mine.”

He reached for her hand. She wasn’t fast enough to draw away—that, or she knew it would spark him further if she tried.

“I’m not yours,” she said softly. They stood in the center of the crowd, as if they were the ones about to be bound together in the sight of the gods. “I’m not anyone’s. But I’m accepting Malvir’s pledge.”

Kegan could have dealt with it, if that was all it had been. The embarrassment meant nothing to him, for what was a fleeting, adolescent humiliation to one that had endured nothing but shame for most of his life? He could’ve walked away right then, or even—against every desire and prayer—stayed in the crowd and lied his way through the laughter and the cheers and the blessings.

He would’ve done that for her. Not easily, no, but willingly. Anything for Zvanna.

He was already releasing her, readying a false smile and drawing breath to apologise, when the hand slammed down on his shoulder.

“Leave her alone, boy.”

Old Rygann’s voice, cracked with age, cut through the silence. This was a man, the founder of the settlement, who looked like he’d been old when the world was still young. He was at least seventy, likely closer to eighty, and though it wasn’t his hand holding Kegan back, he directed the men that surrounded the healer’s son now.

“You get out of here, reaver-bastard, before you bring yet more misfortune down on all of us.”

The hand tried to haul him back, but Kegan stood firm. He was not a boy. He had a man’s strength now.

“Don’t touch me,” he said through clenched teeth. Whatever was on his face caused Zvanna to back away. Other hands joined the first, dragging him away from her, making him stumble.

And, as always, instinct was there to catch him. He turned, he roared, and he swung at the closest of the men hauling him away.

Zvanna’s father went down in a boneless heap, his jaw shattered.

Kegan walked away. Others in the crowd cried out or hurled insults, but none sought to bar his passage, or come after him. There was satisfaction in that. Vindication, even.

He cuffed at the corners of his eyes on the way home, refusing to cry, and unpleasantly soothed by the sweet pain in his throbbing knuckles.

He was nineteen when he burned his mother on her funeral pyre, and spread her ashes along the hillside overlooking Rygann’s Reach the following morning. He knew he would have to have to bear the burden alone, despite all his mother had done for the village. For all that they had feared her, they’d needed her and valued her

And yet here he was, casting her remains to the bitter winds with a prayer to the Seal Sister, alone but for his thoughts.

He imagined them in the village, and if they acknowledged his mother’s death at all it was with a selfish eye to their own suffering. They’d be worried now, with the healer gone. They couldn’t rely on her son to step up, after all. The hereditary chain had been broken when his raiding father had sired him, pouring misfortune into a mage’s blood.

Right now, those people would all be bleating their useless sentiments about his mother, maybe even convincing themselves that a few kind words uttered far too late severed them from the guilt and responsibility of how they had treated her in life. Far more likely, they were quietly celebrating the passing of a shadow from their lives.

Superstitious animals, all of them.

Only three of them came out from the village at all, and they hadn’t made the journey to say their farewells. Zvanna approached him after the lonely ceremony was over—but her son, with the same black hair as his mother, refused to come near Kegan. The boy, now almost three, stayed at his father’s side a short distance away.

“The little one is scared of me,” Kegan observed without rancor.

Zvanna hesitated, just as Kegan’s mother had once hesitated, setting the truth in his mind. “He’s heard stories,” she admitted.

“I’m sure he has.” He tried to keep his tone neutral. “What do you want?”

She kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry for your loss, Kegan. She was a kind soul.”

Kind wasn’t a word he connected with his mother, but now was hardly to the time to argue. “Yes,” he said. “She was. But what did you really come to say? We were friends once. I can tell when you’re holding something back.”

She didn’t smile as she replied. “Old Rygann… He’s going to ask you to leave.”

Kegan scratched his chin. He was too weary that day to feel anything, least of all surprise. He didn’t need to ask why Rygann had come to that decision. There was still one shadow darkening the edge of the settlement. One last shadow that would finally fade away.

“So the bad-omened boy can’t lurk nearby, now his mother’s dead,” he spat onto the ashy earth. “At least she was useful, right? She was the one with the magic.”

“I’m sorry, Kegan.”

For a brief time, together on the hillside, things were just as they had been a few short years ago. She leeched the angry heat from his heart just by being near, and he breathed in the cold air, defying every urge to reach out for her.

“You should go,” he muttered, and nodded towards Malvir and the young boy. “Your family is waiting.”

“Where will you go?” she asked. She drew her furs tighter around herself. “What will you do?”

His mother’s words echoed down the years. We’d die out there, where the woods become ice and snow, all the way to the world’s end...

“I’ll find my father,” he replied.

She looked at him, troubled. He could see the doubt in her eyes, and worse, the fear. The fear that he might be serious.

“You don’t mean that, Kegan. You don’t even know who your father’s people are, or where they hailed from, or… or anything. How would you ever hope to find him?”

“I’ll try, at least.”

Kegan resisted the urge to spit again. Even an impossible ambition sounded better than I don’t know what I’ll do, Zvanna. I’ll probably die alone on the ice.

She was drawing breath to fight him on it, even after all these years of little more than silence, but he hushed her with a shake of his head. “I’ll come see you before I leave. We’ll talk then. I’ll be down in the village tomorrow, for supplies. I’ll need things for my journey.”

Zvanna hesitated again, and he knew. Kegan knew it as if the ancestor-spirits had whispered it to him on the wind.

“Old Rygann has forbidden it,” he sighed. The words weren’t a question, or even a guess. “I’m not allowed down into the Reach. Not even to trade before I go.”

She pressed a small satchel against his chest, and that confirmed it. He could guess what would be in there: dried foodstuffs, and whatever meager provisions her young family could spare. The ferocity of unfamiliar gratitude left him shaking and almost—almost—accepting the gift.

But he handed it back to her.

“I’ll be fine,” he promised her. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

That night, he went into Rygann’s Reach alone.

He carried a week’s worth of supplies in his pack, an ivory spear in his hand, and his hair was woven with his mother’s bone charms. He looked as much a mendicant shaman as she ever had, though he carried himself with a warrior’s bulk, and moved with a hunter’s grace.

Dawn was still three hours distant. Here, in the stillest part of the night, Kegan stalked with exaggerated care, moving between the earthwork huts of the families that had rejected him and his mother for all of his short, harsh life. He felt no malice toward them, not anymore—the old anger was reduced to embers, alive but banked, burning low. If he felt anything more, it was a deep-grained and exhausted sense of pity. They were simple. They were slaves to their misjudgements.

No, his true hatred was reserved for one soul above all others.

Old Rygann’s longhouse sat proudly in the settlement’s heart. Kegan drew near, avoiding the indifferent gazes of the watchmen by staying in the shadows cast by the descending moon. Theirs was a dreary duty, and they treated it with all the informality one would expect. Why should they expect any trouble from the naked tundra, or the bare ocean? No raiders had landed at Rygann’s Reach for a long time, after all.

Kegan ghosted inside.

Old Rygann awoke to find a shadow crouched at the foot of his bed. In the shadow’s pale eyes were slivers of reflected moonlight, and in the shadow’s hands was an ivory knife—a ritual dagger last carried by Krezia Rodhe, the witch that had died only days before. It was a blade that had been used, so it was said, for blood sacrifices.

The shadow smiled, and spoke in a low, feral whisper.

“If you make a single sound without my permission, old man, you die.”

In the light-starved gloom, Rygann could have passed for a hundred years old. His sinuses stung from the reek of lantern oil, and the animal spice of the intruder’s sweat. He nodded in helpless obedience.

The shadow leaned forward, and the reaver-bastard Kegan’s face leered, coldly amused, from the darkness.

“I’m going to tell you something, old man. And you will listen to me, if for no other reason that it lets you live a little longer.”

The dagger, carved from a drüvask tooth, glinted in the half-dark. Kegan rested the tip, carved to a puncturing point, on the man’s saggy throat.

“Nod if you understand.”

Rygann nodded, wisely mute.

“Good.” Kegan kept the knife in place. His eyes were liquid with hatred, his teeth almost trembling with the force of his anger. He was a creature on the edge of savagery, held back only by tattered shreds of humanity.

Rygann swallowed hard, saying nothing. He was shaking himself, for far different reasons.

“You killed my mother,” Kegan growled. “It wasn’t the disease that ate her away from within. It was you. You killed her, day by day, with your mistrust and your ingratitude. You killed her by exiling her to the cold comfort of that cave. You killed her by banishing her on the whims of your stupid superstition.”

The blade rested on the old man’s cheek, ready to saw through the flesh.

“And now you’re killing me,” Kegan added softly. “It wasn’t enough to shame me for the sin of my father’s blood, and curse me for being bad luck. It wasn’t enough to kick a child out of your precious village, over and over, and teach me nothing except how to hate others. Now, while the embers of my mother’s funeral pyre are still warm, you want to damn me to wander the wasteland, to die.”

And then the dagger was gone.

The intruder slipped from the bed, edging back across the room. Kegan’s smile became a grin, scarcely illuminated by the shuttered lantern he held up from the bedchamber’s table.

“That’s all I came to say. I want you to think about those words when I’m gone. I want you to think of the boy you helped to raise by throwing him and his mother out into the cold.”

Rygann didn’t know how to respond, or if the healer’s son even desired a reply. He stayed silent out of a healthy blend of wisdom and fear, breathing in the earthy, oily scent that filled the room.

Kegan unshuttered the lantern, and a sudden amber glow spread across the room. Patches of resinous wetness marked the floorboards, the walls, the shelves, even the bedsheets. The intruder had done his work well—in silence—before waking his prey.

“W-wait,” the old man stammered, breathless with dawning panic. “Wait—”

“No, I have a journey to make,” Kegan said, almost conversationally, “and I should warm my hands before I go. Goodbye, Rygann.”

“Wait! Please!”

But Kegan didn’t wait. He was backing away towards the door, and tossed the lantern like a parting gift. It smashed on the rough floorboards of the bedchamber.

The world ignited, and Kegan laughed even as the flames licked at his own flesh.

Fire is like a living thing, rapacious and ravenous. It has its own hunger, its own whims, and—like fate—its own vile sense of humor. It leapt in caressing licks, as sparks that were carried by the Freljord’s hateful wind, dancing across nearby rooftops. Everywhere that it touched, it bit down and devoured.

Kegan cut north, heading through the forested lowlands, blind to the devastation in his wake. He had more pressing matters than waiting to see if Old Rygann’s hall would burn all the way to the ground. He had the seared ruin of his face to deal with; a screaming, searing wash of pain bathing the left side of his features, soothed only by pressing his flesh into the snowy earth.

Not for the first time, he wondered if there might not be something to all the talk of the ill-fortune in his blood.

By the time he reached high enough ground to turn back and witness the results of his handiwork, the sun was rising above the ocean, and the fire had long since been reduced down to a pall of thick smoke, curling and thinning in the mercy of the morning winds. He held a palmful of ice against his burned cheek, hoping to see Rygann’s hall as a charred, black heart in the center of the village.

What he saw instead stopped his breath. Mute with horror, scarred by carelessness, and staggering in an awkward run, the betrayer made his way back to the scene of his betrayal.

At first, no one marked his return. The survivors wandered among the charred skeletons of their homes, where all they owned was now gone. He was just one more silhouette in the smoky haze, one more scarred face among those that still lived.

He found Zvanna outside the blackened remains of her hut. She’d been laid carefully on the earth with her son and husband, the three of them silent and still beneath the same sooty blanket. Kegan crouched beside them for an unknown time, his skull empty of thought, his body empty of strength. Perhaps he wept. He wasn’t sure—not then, and not after—though he felt the sting of salt upon his wounded cheek.

He could only remember two things for certain, in his time at her side. The first was the sight of the family’s faces when he pulled the sheet back, to be certain it was them. When he had his answer, he covered them again.

The second was resting his ungloved hands on the filthy shroud, pleading for his mother’s old magic to work through him. He achieved no more in that moment than he ever had, when seeking to draw upon his supposed gifts.

They stayed dead. He stayed broken.

Some time later, of course, the others came for him. Kegan stayed on his knees by Zvanna’s side as they threw insults and blame, as they bleated about hexes and sacred misfortune, and cursed the day he’d been born. Kegan let it wash over him. It was nothing against the emptiness in his chest and the acid ache of his face.

The survivors had no idea. They blamed him out of mournful superstition because there was no one else to blame, little knowing the true harm he’d done to them all. They blamed his blood when they should have blamed his deeds.

Kegan left the razed village without looking back. He walked out into the wilderness, just as he had planned, though the anticipated sense of exultation was now nothing but ashes in his mouth.

What followed were the weeks of wandering. Kegan made his way inland, following game spoor and trade-trails, with no destination in mind and no knowledge of what settlements lay where. The only places he knew well were isolated glades and mountainsides with harvestable herbs his mother had used in her medicinal concoctions. Even the closest settlement, Valar’s Hollow, was weeks away, and likely to be the new home of any survivors from Rygann’s Reach. If Kegan found his way there, he doubted the welcome would be warm. Far likelier, it would be fatal.

He hunted when he could, though he lacked a true hunter’s skills. Once he gorged on the half-cooked carcass of a rabbit, only to throw the mess back up hours later when his belly rebelled.

The days bled into weeks, and the weeks into a month, and more, as the skies stayed dark and the weather turned foul. He saw no other tribespeople. He saw no sign of nearby settlements. He spent hours in a snowblind daze, and others in a frost-mad trance. Day after day he encountered nothing but the icy indifference of his homeland—the Freljord cared nothing for whether he lived or died by its howling breath. Nowhere else in the world could teach such a brutal lesson in a man’s insignificance.

Fortune, or perhaps a cruel twist of fate, led him to a cave formed from the same pale rock as his mother’s sanctuary. Emaciated, weakened from exposure, scarred by his own fire, Kegan Rodhe lay down on the cold rock, feeling his skin freeze to the stone. He would lie here and wait for the latest blizzard to die down, or he would lie here and wait to die. Whichever came first.

But on that night, he met the man who would become his teacher. His master.

The figure melted out of the storm in a weary trudge, with his shoulders hunched and head down. His beard was shaggy, and grey not with age but from the bite of the frosty winds. His features were gaunt beneath his hood, and his eyes shimmered with an unnatural iridescence. Strangest of all was the man’s skin, mottled and tattooed—in the storm’s light, with each crash of lightning, the flesh looked as though it were darkening to blue.

Later, by firelight, it was far more clearly paling to violet.

As meetings fated by destiny went, it was too anticlimactic for any bard’s tale, or saga of old. No arcane declarations were made, and no binding pacts were sworn. The newcomer had merely stood at the mouth of the cave, turning a suspicious eye on the human wreckage lying before him.

“What,” the sorcerer muttered, “do we have here?”

Kegan drifted in and out of consciousness, as well as his senses. When he finally managed to summon words, he accused the older man of being a spirit, or an illusion.

In answer, the sorcerer crouched beside him, offering a hand.

Warmth spread through Kegan from his touch, in a rush of tingling… life. It was not the sting of flame, yet the relief it brought was so fierce that it almost broke him.

“I am neither a phantom nor a fiction,” the newcomer had said. “My name is Ryze. And you, dear miserable creature… Who are you?”

Kegan woke well after dawn, thumbing the grit from his eyes. It didn’t surprise him to see that his master was already up, sitting cross-legged and with his eyes closed. He was meditating, the barbarian knew, though he couldn’t understand the point of sitting still for an hour a day. What was it supposed to accomplish? It seemed a strange suspension between sleeping and being awake, to no obvious purpose...

“Good morning,” the sorcerer said, without opening his eyes. “You did not sleep well,” he added. As so often, it was a statement and not a question.

Kegan emptied one nostril into the ashes of the campfire, and grunted. “Why do I feel like you’re watching me, even when your eyes are closed?”

“Because you’re uneasy around others. It makes you doubt their intentions.”

Kegan grunted again. “There’s nothing wrong with a little healthy suspicion.”

Ryze chuckled, remaining motionless in his meditative pose.

Kegan bristled at that. “What’s so funny?”

“I hear myself in your words, sometimes. The way you turn mistrust into a virtue is especially familiar to me. I can’t say I blame you, given all you have endured.”

Kegan stared at him. Can he read my mind? Does he see my dreams...?

The sorcerer made no response. Not even a twitch.

The young barbarian rose, stretching out the night’s soreness with a delicious crackle of sinew. “Nnh. Do you want me to heat the last of the broth, to break our fast?”

“Decent of you, Kegan. Will you gather firewood, or use your gifts?”

The question was loaded, bordering on condescending, and it took no small effort for Kegan to avoid the bait. “Firewood. I’ll try the magic again later.”

Another chuckle. Another maddening chuckle. “As you wish,” Ryze replied.

Kegan took his time finding enough fallen deadwood. His skull was awhirl with echoes of their conversations these last few weeks. Something was nagging at the back of his brain, something that made the healing burn scars itch across his face. It was only when he returned to their makeshift camp, and dumped the armful of broken branches, that he realized what it was.

“Master.”

The sorcerer didn’t move, but the air seemed to change around them both. It became sharper, somehow—maybe a touch cooler, charged with some unseen force.

“Yes?”

Kegan cleared his throat, fighting for the right way to say it. “When you spoke of magic yesterday, you mentioned… You mentioned the stuff of creation.”

Ryze remained motionless, but for his sorcery-darkened lips. “I did, yes. Go on.”

Kegan took a breath, struggling with the immensity of what he wanted to say. “Well. Water comes from rain, ice, and the sea. Fire comes from sparks and tinder, or from lightning striking the forest. And those trees that make up the forest, they come from seeds.”

“All true, to some degree. And surprisingly poetic for this hour of the morning. What is the conclusion of this thesis?”

“This what?”

The older man smiled, not unkindly. “What are you trying to say, Kegan?”

“Just that everything comes from somewhere. Everything has… a birth. A source. Is it the same for magic? Does it have a source in the world?”

Ryze didn’t answer at once. His stillness, to Kegan’s eyes, seemed suddenly a thing of restraint, rather than serenity.

“That is an intelligent question, my friend. There is a purity to your barbaric way of thinking, and I commend you for that line of thought. But it is not a discussion you and I are ready to have.”

The barbarian clenched his teeth, swallowing his temper. Finally he’d asked something worthy of an answer, and his master denied it to him. “But I was thinking… If you controlled the rain, you could make new rivers. If you had a thousand seeds, you could plant a new forest. If you have iron, you can forge an axe. What if you could control the source of magic? You wouldn’t need to guide it or nudge it. You could command it, after all.”

Ryze opened his eyes.

His gaze was colder than any Freljordian wind. There was mercy in those eyes, and admiration, but beneath both of those was a knifing, sickly hint of fear.

You’re afraid, Kegan thought, and his skin crawled at the very idea.

He didn’t know why. He couldn’t guess what it was about his words would inspire that stern, cold dread in his master’s soul. But Kegan knew what fear looked like, in the eyes of others. He’d seen it all his life.

“Not yet,” Ryze murmured. “When you are ready, we will speak of this. But not yet.”

Kegan Rodhe nodded, agreeing without understanding, intrigued by the unease in his master’s stare. Fear was a weakness, after all, and weaknesses had to be faced.

And conquered.

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.