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The Echoes Left Behind

Anthony Reynolds

Blood pooled beneath him, bright crimson against pristine white stone. His sword lay nearby, its blade broken. His killers stood around him, shadows on the periphery, but he saw nothing except her.

Her eyes stared into his own, without seeing. His blood-spattered face was reflected back at him. He was lying on his side. His breath was shallow, and weakening.

Her lifeless hand was cold, but he didn’t feel anything. A calmness descended upon him like a shroud. There was no pain, no fear, no doubt. Not any more.

His armored fingers tightened around her hand. He couldn’t be with her in life, but he would be with her in death.

For the first time in what seemed forever, he felt at peace…

“Hello, Ledros,” said a voice that shouldn’t be there.

Ledros… His name.

There was an evil, mocking laugh, and a clink of chains.

“I don’t know why you do this to yourself, but I have enjoyed seeing you suffer.”

Reality crashed over him like a tidal wave, threatening to drag him under.

The blood beneath him was centuries old, flaking and brown. The stone was not white, but black, and cracked. The sky was filled with turbulent, dark clouds lit from within by lightning.

And everywhere, the Black Mist coiled.

She was still there for a moment, and he clung to her, unwilling to let her go.

“My love,” he breathed, but then she faded, like ash on the wind, and he was left grasping at nothing.

He was dead.

And he was trapped here in this perpetual in-between.

Ledros rose, and picked up the shattered remnant of his sword.

He leveled the ghostly blade at the one who had shattered the illusion of his memory. The hateful spirit lurked in darkness, leering at him, eyes burning with cold flame. His cursed lantern sat on a smashed chunk of masonry nearby, radiating beams of deadlight, captive souls writhing within.

The Chain Warden. Thresh.

Oh, how he hated him.

The cursed spirit had haunted him for what seemed like centuries, taunting him, mocking him. Now he had found his way here? This was his sanctuary, the only place he could feel even a fleeting moment of peace before the horror of his reality reasserted itself.

“Why are you here?” Ledros demanded. His voice was dull and hollow, as if he spoke from distance or time far away.

“You were lost for quite a while this time,” said Thresh. “Months. Perhaps years. I don’t keep track any more.”

Ledros lowered his blade, and took stock of his surroundings.

He remembered this place as it had been—white stone and shining gold bathed in sunlight. Protective white mist had wreathed the isles, resisting outsiders. When they had first landed, it seemed a land beloved by the gods—a place of wealth, and knowledge, and wonder, untouched by famine or war. It had just made it easier. There had been little resistance.

Now there was no sun. All was darkness. The ruptured, shattered remnants of the library loomed above, like some great, desiccated corpse. Chunks of stonework hung in mid-air, where they’d been blasted outward and locked in time. He had been a fool to think the gods had loved this place, for they had clearly forsaken it.

Every time he re-emerged from the unformed madness of the Black Mist and reformed, it was here, where his mortal body had fallen, so long ago. Every time it was the same. Nothing changed.

The one waiting for him was new, however. It was not a change he welcomed.

Out of habit, he reached for the pendant he always wore around his neck… but it was not there.

“No…” The corpse-light glowing within him flared brightly in rising panic.

“Such a pretty trinket,” said Thresh.

Ledros’ head snapped around, eyes blazing. Thresh held aloft a short chain, from which hung a delicate silver pendant engraved with two roses, their leaves and stalks wrapped around each other like a lovers’ embrace.

Anger surged within Ledros, hot and sudden, and his sword flared as he took a step toward Thresh. He’d been a big man in life, full of wrath and violence—the king’s champion, no less. He towered over Thresh.

“That… is… mine,” hissed Ledros.

The Chain Warden did not flee before him like the lesser spirits did. The death’s head that was his face was hard to read, but there was cruel amusement in his eyes.

“You’re an aberration, Ledros,” he said, still dangling the pendant before him. “Some might say we all are, but you’re different. You stand out. Here, you are the real abnormality.”

“Give it to me,” snarled Ledros, blade at the ready. “I will cut you down.”

“You could try,” said Thresh. He spoke mildly, but his eyes burned, eager for violence. He sighed. “But this gets us nowhere. Here. Take it. It means nothing to me.”

He tossed it away with a dismissive flick. Ledros caught it in one black gauntlet, his arm snapping out with a speed that belied his size. He opened his massive fist, inspecting the pendant. It was undamaged.

Ledros sheathed his blade and removed his spiked helm. His face was insubstantial, a ghostly echo of how he had appeared in life. A cold wind whipped across the blasted landscape, but he didn’t feel it.

He pulled the precious pendant over his head, and slipped his helmet back on.

“Don’t you ever wish to see an end to this vile existence, Chain Warden?” Ledros said. “To finally be at peace?”

Thresh shook his head, laughing. “We have what mortals have coveted since time immemorial—eternity.”

“It makes us prisoners.”

Thresh smirked, and turned away, the chains and hooks hanging from his belt clinking. His lantern drifted along beside him, though he didn’t so much as touch it.

“You cling so desperately to the past, even as it runs through your fingers, like sand in a timepiece,” said Thresh, “yet you’re blind to the wonder of what we have been given. It has made us gods.”

“It is a curse,” hissed Ledros.

“Run along then, sword-champion,” Thresh said, gesturing Ledros away, dismissively. “Go, find your paramour. Perhaps this time she’ll even remember you…”

Ledros became very still, eyes narrowing.

“Tell me something,” said Thresh. “You seek to save her, but from what? She does not seem tormented. You, however…”

“You walk a dangerous line, warden,” snarled Ledros.

“Is it for her sake you do this? Or your own?”

Thresh had said words to this effect before. He seemed intent on making a mockery of Ledros’ efforts.

“I am not one of your playthings, warden,” Ledros said. “Do not make the mistake of thinking you can toy with me.”

Thresh smiled, exposing the shark-like teeth of a predator.

“Of course not,” he said.

With a gesture, Thresh called his lantern. It came to him, swiftly, then hovered just below his outstretched taloned hand. In the lantern’s glowing deadlight, Ledros saw anguished faces, pressing against their confinement, before fading to be replaced by others—a horrific cavalcade of tormented souls. Thresh smiled, savoring their pain.

“I don’t need to torture you,” he said. “You do that to yourself.”

The Chain Warden stepped into the darkness, leaving Ledros utterly alone.

A hollow wind ripped through the shattered city, but he did not feel it.

He felt nothing but her.

She was hunting.

Ledros stepped into the mist, letting it flow around him. Then he shifted through it.





The Black Mist writhed around him, full of hate, anger, and fear, but he remained distinct from it, maintaining his sense of self. He was drawn toward her like a moth to candlelight, and just as unheeding of the danger. He whipped across what had once been the Blessed Isles, passing over wasted lands and the churning water of the straits dividing them. Wherever the Black Mist extended—reaching blindly, searching, always searching—he was able to go. This was their sunless prison.

Her burning presence within the darkness lured him on. She was close. Feeling the nearness of her, he stepped from the mist once more.

He stood in a blackened forest, the trees withered and dead, their branches dry and cracked. The echoes of leaves long since fallen rippled in the memory of a breeze far more gentle than the cold gale now howling through the dead forest.

He sensed movement in the trees. His heavy boots crunched on blackened soil as he began to stalk it.

His iron shield was strapped to his left arm, though he didn’t remember securing it there, and he drew his sword. The leather wrapped around its hilt had rotted long ago, and while the blade was broken a few feet above the hilt, the ghostly outline of its full length could still be seen, glowing softly. Shattered and corroded by the ravages of time, it was a shadow of its former majesty. It had been gifted to him by the king himself, back when his monarch was a man to be admired and loved.

The ground sloped sharply below, but he kept to the high ground, moving along a ridge marked with jutting stone and twisted roots. He could see them now—shadowy spirits borne upon spectral steeds, galloping through the glen below. They moved swiftly, weaving between the trees, east toward a sun that would never again rise over these shores.

They moved as one, like a hunting party… yet they were the ones being hunted.

Ledros broke into a run, keeping pace with them.

A voice echoed through the trees.

“We come for you, betrayers…”

It spoke not as a single voice, but rather a score or more of them, layered and overlapping, a legion of souls speaking as one. The strongest of them was one he knew well.

Ledros quickened his pace, running fast and low. The riders below had been forced to weave around massive stone formations and the boles of ancient, desiccated trees. It slowed them, while the ridge he ran was straight. He quickly outpaced them and drew ahead of the hunted spirits.

Ledros turned abruptly, stepping over the edge of a sheer cliff. He landed in a crouch at the base, some thirty feet below, the earth cracking beneath him.

He stood within a narrow defile, where the natural contours of the land had created a funnel. The riders would have to come through.

With blade drawn, he waited.

The first of the horsemen appeared, riding at a gallop, a being of spirit and twisted metal—a vile mockery of the once-proud knights of the Iron Order. They were nothing to him now, just hateful fragments of the men they had once been.

A dark lance, its tip jagged and hooked, was clasped in the knight’s mailed grip, and great curling horns extended from his helm. Seeing Ledros, he wrenched his mount violently to the side, making it snarl and spit. Its hooves were wreathed in shadow, and it seemed not to touch the ground at all.

Had Ledros killed this one before? Or had he been one of those that had survived his rampage, and killed him?

The other riders appeared, pulling their steeds up short.

“Stand aside, bladesman,” one hissed.

“We have no quarrel with you,” said another.

“Our quarrel will last until the end of time itself,” growled Ledros.

“So be it,” snarled another of the deathly knights. “Ride him down!”

“You shouldn’t have stopped,” said Ledros, a smirk playing on his lips. “That was an error.”

One of the knights was hurled from his saddle, a glowing spear impaling him. His steed turned to smoke as he hit the ground. The knight screamed as he followed it into nothingness, condemned to join the Black Mist once more. No spirit went to that darkness willingly.

“She’s here!” roared the lead rider, dragging his steed around to face the new threat.

There was confusion among the others, caught somewhere between the desire to turn and fight, and to flee in panic.

They’d have been better off taking their chances at riding him down. At least a few might have escaped. Against her, all would be returned to the mist.

Another knight was ripped from the saddle, a spear hurled from the mist taking him in the chest.

Then she appeared, loping from the gloom like a lioness on the hunt, her eyes burning with predatory light.

Kalista.

Ledros’ gaze was instantly drawn to the ethereal speartips protruding from her back, and he felt a pang in the core of his being, as sharp as the blades that had ended his own life.

Kalista padded forward, a spectral spear clasped in one hand. A knight charged her, hook-bladed lance lowered, but she rolled lightly out of the way. Coming to one knee, she hurled her spear, impaling the knight as he rode past. Even as she threw, she was moving toward her next enemy.

She flexed her hand, and a new weapon materialized in her grasp.

A sword flashed down at her, but Kalista avoided it expertly, slapping the blade aside with the haft of her spear, before swaying away from the flailing hooves of the knight’s steed. Leaping from a blackened rock, she twisted in the air and drove her spear down into the rider’s chest, banishing him to darkness. She landed in perfect balance, eyes locked to her next victim.

Ledros had never met a woman as strong as Kalista in life. In death, she was unstoppable.

While the others focused on her, two of the knights charged Ledros, belatedly seeking to escape Kalista’s methodical slaughter. Stepping sideward at the last moment, Ledros slammed his heavy shield into the steed of the first, knocking the spectral beast to the ground, legs kicking, and sending its rider flying from the saddle.

The lance of the second knight took Ledros in the side, punching through his armor and snapping halfway down its length. Nevertheless, Ledros retained his feet and spun, lashing out with his blade. He struck through the neck of the knight’s steed, a blow that would have decapitated the beast had it been made of flesh and bone. Instead, it exploded into nothing with a keening scream. Its rider crashed to the ground.

Ledros smashed the ghostly warrior backward with a heavy blow of his shield as he rose, hurling him onto the point of Kalista’s spear. Her hunt, her kill.

Ledros sheathed his blade, and watched as she destroyed the last of the spirits.

Tall and lean, Kalista was in constant motion. Her enemies had been martial templars whose skill at arms was legendary, yet she moved among them effortlessly, side-stepping lance thrusts and sword strikes, dispatching each in turn.

Then it was done, and the only two left standing were Kalista and Ledros.

“Kalista?” he said.

She turned her gaze upon him, but there was no hint of recognition in her eyes. Her expression was stern, as it ever had been in life. She regarded him coldly, unblinking.

“We are the Spear of Vengeance,” she replied in that voice that was not hers alone.

“You are Kalista, Spear of the Argent Throne,” said Ledros.

He knew the words she would speak next before she even opened her mouth. It was the same every time.

“We are retribution,” said Kalista. “Speak your pledge, or begone.”

“You were niece to the king I served in life,” said Ledros. “We are… acquainted with each other.”

Kalista regarded him for a moment, then she turned and strode away.

“Our task is unfinished,” she said, without looking back. “The betrayers will suffer our wrath.”

“Your task can never be finished,” said Ledros, hurrying to keep pace. “You are trapped in a never-ending spiral! I am here to help you.”

“The guilty shall be punished,” said Kalista, continuing to march back through the trees.

“You remember this, don’t you?” said Ledros, drawing the pendant from around his neck. That gave her pause, as it always did. It was the one thing Ledros had discovered that could break through her fugue, even if only for a moment. He just needed to figure out how to extend that moment…

Kalista came to a halt, cocking her head to one side as she looked at the delicate pendant. She reached for it, but stopped herself before she touched it.

“I tried to give this to you once,” said Ledros. “You refused it.”

Uncertainty touched her eyes.

“We… I… remember,” she said.

She looked at him—actually saw him.

“Ledros,” she said. Her voice was her own now, and for a moment she was the woman he remembered. The woman he’d loved. Her features softened, ever so slightly. “I could never have given you what you wanted.”

“I understand,” said Ledros, “even if I didn’t at the time.”

Kalista looked around, as if only now becoming aware of her surroundings. She looked at her hands, glowing from within and as insubstantial as smoke. Ledros saw confusion, then anguish play across her face. Then her features hardened.

“Would that I had never brought him here,” said Kalista. “All this could have been averted.”

“It was not your fault,” said Ledros. “I knew madness had claimed him. I could have ended it before it came to this. No one would have questioned his death. No one would have mourned him.”

“He wasn’t always that way,” said Kalista.

“No, but the man we knew died long before all this,” Ledros said, gesturing around him.

“…We have a task to complete.”

Hope stirred within him. It was an unfamiliar feeling.

“Whatever it is, we will complete it together, just as…” he said, but his words petered out as he realized his error.

The cold mask had dropped over her features, and she turned and strode away. Despair clutched at Ledros.

He’d failed again, just as he had so many times before.

He saw himself in the early years after the Ruination, stalking the spirits of those who had killed her in life, convinced that destroying them would free her. It hadn’t. He’d spent countless years pursuing that goal, but it had amounted to nothing.

He saw himself felling the arrogant cavalry captain, Hecarim, hacking his head from his shoulders and rendering him back to the mist. That one had struck Kalista the final, fatal blow, and had long toiled, seeking his end. Time and again they fought, as the years, and decades, and centuries rolled by, and the unseen stars turned overhead. But Hecarim was strong of will, and he returned from the Black Mist, of course, each time more monstrous than the last.

Either way, it changed nothing. Kalista became steadily more lost as she absorbed the vengeful spirits of the mortals who pledged themselves to her, seeking her aid against their own betrayers.

Once, he had brought Kalista face to face with Hecarim, a feat that had taken dozens of lesser deaths to achieve. He had believed that was the key to finally setting her free, and he’d rejoiced as he saw the now monstrous creature Hecarim skewered, a dozen spears piercing his towering frame… but banishing him to the darkness had done nothing. A moment of satisfaction, and then it was past.

Nothing had changed.

Just another failure added to his growing tally.

At one point, despair drove him toward self destruction. The purity of the one sunrise he’d seen since the blood had ceased coursing through his veins burned him, his intangible body dissipating like vapor. Guilt at leaving Kalista behind clawed at him, but in that agony he had rejoiced, daring to believe he’d finally found release.

Even in seeking final oblivion, he had failed, and he’d been condemned to the madness of the Black Mist once more.

All the moments preceding his banishment blurred together in a never-ending cavalcade of horror and defeat.

He roared as a purple-skinned sorcerer cast him back to the darkness, tearing him asunder with runic magics.The savage joy he’d felt as he joined the slaughter in the streets of a festering harbor city overrun with the Black Mist gave way to sudden pain as he was blasted to nothingness by the faith of indigenous witches.

He laughed as a sword impaled him on its length, but his amusement turned to agony as the blade burst into searing light, burning with the intensity of the sun.

Again and again and again he’d been condemned back to the nightmarish Black Mist, but always he’d returned. Every time, he returned to a land locked in stasis, waking in the same place, the same way.

A being of lesser will would have succumbed to insanity long ago, as so many of the spirits had. But not him. Failure clung to him, but his will was as iron. His stubborn determination to free her kept him going. That was what ensured he came back, over and over again.

Snapping back to the present, Ledros watched Kalista stalk away from him, intent on her unending mission.

A creeping melancholia settled within him. Was it all for nothing?

Was Thresh right? Was his attempt to free her from her path of retribution actually selfish?

She was sleepwalking through this nightmare, unaware of its true horrors. Would she thank him were he to wake her? Perhaps she would despise him, wishing he had let her be.

Ledros shook his head, trying to dislodge the insidious notion, even as a vision of Thresh—smiling, predatory—appeared in his mind.

“Get out of my head,” he snarled, cursing Thresh.

A new idea came to him suddenly, banishing his lingering doubts and fears. There was something he hadn’t tried, something he’d never considered until now.

“Kalista,” he called.

She did not heed him, and continued on her way, her step unrelenting.

He loosened his sword belt, and cast his scabbarded blade to the ground. He wouldn’t need it any more.

“I betrayed you,” he called out.

She stopped, her head whipping around, unblinking eyes locking on to him.

“I should have stepped forward as soon as the order was given,” Ledros continued. “I knew Hecarim was looking for any excuse to be rid of you. You’d always been the king’s favorite. It all happened so fast, but I should have been faster. We could have faced them, back to back. We could have cut our way through them and been free, together! I betrayed you with my inaction, Kalista. I failed you.”

Kalista’s eyes narrowed

“Betrayer,” she intoned.

An ethereal spear manifested in her grasp, and she began marching toward him.

Ledros unstrapped his shield and threw it aside as she broke into a loping run. He opened his arms wide, welcoming what was to come.

The first spear drove him back a step as it impaled him.

His had been the true betrayal. He’d loved her, even if he’d only spoken those words aloud alone, in the darkness of night…

A second spear drove through him, hurled with tremendous force. He staggered, but stubbornly remained standing.

He had not stepped in to stop her being murdered. He was her real betrayer.

Her third spear plunged through him, and now he dropped to both knees. He smiled, even as his strength leached from him.

Yes, this was it. This was what would finally break her from that awful, unending spiral. He was sure of it.

“Finish it,” he said, looking up at her. “Finish it, and be free.”

They stared at each other for a moment, a pair of undying spirits, their insubstantial forms rippling with deathless energy. In that moment, Ledros felt only love. In his mind’s eye, he saw her as she had been in life—regal, beautiful, strong.

“Death to all betrayers,” she said, and ran him through.

Ledros’ vision wavered as his form began to come apart, yet he saw Kalista’s expression change, the impassive mask dropping, replaced with dawning horror.

“Ledros?” she said, her voice now her own.

Her eyes were wide, and seemed to fill with shimmering tears. She rushed to be beside him as Ledros fell.

“What have I done?” she breathed.

He wanted to reassure her, but no words came forth.

I did this for you.

Darkness crashed in, and tendrils of mist reached to claim him.

Kalista reached out to comfort him, but her fingers passed through his dissolving form. Her mouth moved, but he could not hear her over the roaring madness of the Black Mist.

His armor fell to the ground and turned to dust, along with his sword. Blind terror beckoned, but he went into it gladly.

Dimly, he registered the pale specter of Thresh, watching from the shadows with his fixed, hungry smile. Even the Chain Warden’s unwanted presence could not dampen Ledros’ moment of victory.

He’d done it. He had freed her.

It was over.





Blind, all-consuming terror.

Incandescent, uncontrollable rage.

Claustrophobic horror, cloying and choking.

And behind it all was the insatiable hunger—the yearning to feed on warmth and life, to draw more souls into darkness.

The cacophony was deafening—a million screaming, tortured souls, writhing and roiling in shared torment.

This was the Black Mist.

And only the strongest of souls could escape its grasp. Only those with unfinished business.

Blood pooled beneath him, bright crimson against pristine white stone. His sword lay nearby, its blade broken. His killers stood around him, shadows on the periphery, but he saw nothing except her.

Her eyes stared into his own, without seeing. His blood-spattered face was reflected back at him. He was lying on his side. His breath was shallow, and weakening.

Her lifeless hand was cold, but he didn’t feel anything. A calmness descended upon him like a shroud. There was no pain, no fear, no doubt. Not any more.

His armored fingers tightened around her hand. He couldn’t be with her in life, but he would be with her in death.

For the first time in what seemed forever, he felt at peace…

No. Something was not right.

Reality crashed in.

None of this was real. This was but an echo left behind, the residual pain of his death, hundreds of lifetimes earlier.

Thankfully, the Chain Warden was not here to mock him.

How long had it been, this time? There was no way to know. Decades, or a few minutes—it could have been either, and yet it hardly mattered. Nothing changed in this vile realm of stasis.

Then he remembered, and hope surged through him. It was not a sensation he was familiar with, but it blossomed like the first bud of a seemingly dead tree after rainfall.

He turned, and she was there, and for a moment he knew joy, true joy. She was herself again, and she had come to him!

Then he saw her expression. The cold, severe mask, the lack of recognition in her eyes. The hope inside him withered and died.

Kalista stared past him, her head cocked, as if listening to something only she could hear.

“We accept your pledge,” she said, before turning and stepping into the mist.

Then she was gone.

Reaching out with his will, Ledros felt her now far away. Someone had called to her, from a distant continent to the north-west. Someone else who had traded their soul for a promise of vengeance against whoever had wronged them. They knew not what horror awaited.

Bitterness and bile filled Ledros. He cursed himself, twisting his hatred inward.

There was no hope. He knew that now. He’d been a fool to think otherwise.

She was trapped for eternity, as were they all. Only pride and stubbornness had made him think he could solve it, like a riddle, for all these years.

Pride and stubbornness—traits that were as much his bane in death as they had been in life, it seemed.

The cursed Chain Warden was right. It was a selfish desire to free her, he saw that now. Kalista may not be herself, but at least she was not tormented like he was. At least she had purpose.

Ledros yanked the pendant from around his neck, shattering the links of its thin chain. He hurled it into the mist.

To even hope for anything more was foolishness. There could be no peace, not unless the curse that held these isles in its foetid grasp was broken.

“And so, I must end it,” Ledros said.

Oblivion called.





Thresh stepped from the darkness. He glanced around, ensuring he was alone. Then he knelt and picked up the discarded silver pendant.

The fool had been so close. He was on the brink of bringing her back… and now, after countless centuries of trying, he had abandoned his task, at the very moment of success.

Thresh smiled, cruelly. He liked seeing hope wither and die, like blighted fruit upon the vine, as what could have been sweet turned to poison. It amused him.

He opened his lantern, and tossed the pendant within. Then he stepped back into the darkness, and faded from view.

After a time, the rattle of his chains faded, and he was gone.

More stories

  1. Shadow and Fortune

    Shadow and Fortune

    Graham McNeill

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

    A slow night by Bilgewater's standards.

    At least since the Corsair King had fallen.

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

    The hooded man kept on walking.

    “Help. Me.”

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

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

    “Help. Me,” he said again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The fat man laughed.

    “You know who you're talking to?”

    “No. Do you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “I cannot be him again,” said Lucian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “Hey!” shouted a voice over the water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A gunshot meant for her.

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

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

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

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

    “That true?”

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

    “Not much left to control over there now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “I bring words for him.”

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

    “Seven hells, what's she doing here?”

    “Did Illaoi know Byrne?”

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

    “Really?”

    “So the scuttlebutt goes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Illaoi grinned, exposing a mouthful of pulped mango.

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

    “What does that mean?”

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

    “Take it,” said Illaoi.

    “What is it?”

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

    “What is it really?”

    “Nothing more than I say.”

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

    Illaoi leaned in to whisper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    She'd been looking towards the Shadow Isles.

    Nobody ever fished Bilgewater Bay at night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Piet opened his eyes.

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

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

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

    The black mist...

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

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

    Piet never finished his plea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The darkness boiled across the sea and swept onto land.

    And the lights in Bilgewater started to go out.

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

    The Harrowing.

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

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

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

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

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

    “What are you doing?” asked Rafen.

    “What does it look like I’m doing?”

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

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

    “Just what?”

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

    “We’re not here to stop you.”

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

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

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

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

    “Course it bloody is,” said Rafen.

    Miss Fortune took a breath and nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “What’s going on?” shouted Olaf.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    That they were dead already meant nothing to him.

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

    Then he saw it.

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

    Olaf raised his axe in salute of his killer.

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

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

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

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

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

    How long had it been since that terrible night?

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

    The grief ebbed slowly, but it remained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Let me be your shield.

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

    The locket glistened with lambent green flame.

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

    “Thresh,” he whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Miss Fortune drew her pistols.

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

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

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

    “What about you?” he asked.

    Miss Fortune patted her pouch of pistol shot.

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

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

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

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

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

    Mist clung to every outcropping of timber.

    Discarded figureheads wept frozen tears.

    Mist and shadows gathered.

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

    “Not every way,” said Miss Fortune.

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

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

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

    Rafen grunted as they spread into the empty square.

    “What next?”

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

    The black mist twitched with things moving in its depths.

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

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

    For a moment, all was silent.

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

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

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

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

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

    A moment of sublime connection passed between them.

    The beast’s soul knew him.

    Olaf laughed with joy.

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

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

    He leapt into the air, axe aloft.

    He looked glorious death in the face.

    A tentacle whipped out and lashed around his thigh.

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

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

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

    A second shot and another spirit vanished.

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

    It’s all about where you place your faith.

    Gods, bullets or her own skill?

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

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

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

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

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

    Whatever works, thought Miss Fortune.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “What was in that bomb?”

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

    “And stuff like that works against the dead?”

    “My mother believed in it,” she said.

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

    “Don’t say it,” warned Miss Fortune.

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

    Reforming, returning.

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

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

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

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

    A bass rumble rolled through the square. Then another.

    Percussive thunder strikes, rising in a stalking storm.

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

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

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

    “A dread knight,” said Miss Fortune.

    Rafen shook his head, his face drained of color.

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

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

    The Shadow of War.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “You want to fight the Shadow of War?”

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

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

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

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

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

    Olaf was not happy with this doom.

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

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

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

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

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

    Angry curses followed him down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “No. We came out to fight.”

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

    “To fight for Bilgewater.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Lucian leveled his pistols, but she shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “Don’t look at them,” warned Lucian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “What is that place?” asked Lucian.

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

    “Is it safe?”

    “It’s better than staying out here.”

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

    Rafen paused at the crumbling parapet and looked down.

    “Getting higher every year,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

    Miss Fortune nodded.

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

    “It’s your funeral,” replied Rafen.

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

    “The beast!” he cried.

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

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

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

    “Get everyone inside,” said Lucian.

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

    Lucian drew his pistols. “Thresh is mine.”

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

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

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

    “Run!” shouted Miss Fortune.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Lucian lifted his pistols.

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

    The toothed grin never faltered beneath the ragged cowl.

    “The weapons of light,” he said.

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

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

    He loosed a pair of blinding shots.

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

    Then the howls changed to gurgling laughter.

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

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

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

    Lucian froze.

    “What did you just say?”

    Thresh laughed, a wheezing, consumptive rasp.

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

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

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

    Lucian saw tortured spirits twisting in its depths.

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

    “No...” said Lucian. “I saw her die.”

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

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

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

    “Hope was her weakness. Love her undoing.”

    Lucian looked up into Thresh’s ravaged features.

    His eyes were voids, dark holes into emptiness.

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

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

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

    She imagined the breath of ghostly steeds on her neck.

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

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

    The absurdity of the thought made her laugh, and she was still laughing as she slammed into the warped timber doors of the temple. Rafen and her ragged band were already there, hammering fists and palms against the door.

    “In the name of the Bearded Lady, let us in!” he yelled.

    He looked up as Miss Fortune joined him.

    “The doors are shut,” he said.

    “I noticed,” she gasped, wrenching the pendant Illaoi had given her. She placed her palm flat on door, with the coral pressed hard against the wood.

    “Illaoi!” she shouted. “I’m ready to stamp on that damn eel’s neck. Now open the bloody door!”

    “Eel?” said Rafen. “What eel? What are you talking about?”

    “Never mind,” she snapped, battering her palm bloody against the wood. “I think it was a metaphor.”

    The door swung outwards as if it had been unbarred the whole time. Miss Fortune stepped back to allow her fighters inside first, and finally turned around.

    Hecarim reared up and swung his fiery glaive for her skull.

    A hand grasped her collar and hauled her backward. The tip of the weapon sliced an inch from her throat.

    She fell hard on her backside.

    Illaoi stood in the doorway, holding her stone idol out before her like a shield. White mist clung to it like corposant.

    “The dead are not welcome here,” she said.

    Rafen and the others hauled the door shut and dropped a heavy spar of seasoned oak into place on the rusted anchors to either side. A huge impact slammed into the door.

    Wood split and splinters flew.

    Illaoi turned and walked past Miss Fortune, still sprawled on a mosaic floor of seashells and clay fragments.

    “You took your sweet time, girl,” she said as Miss Fortune climbed to her feet. The temple was filled with at least two hundred people, maybe more. She saw a wide cross section of Bilgewater’s denizens: its native population, pirates, traders and assorted sea-scum, together with travellers unlucky or unwise enough to seek a berth so close to the Harrowing.

    “Is that door going to hold?” she asked.

    “It will or it won’t,” said Illaoi, heading towards a many-tentacled statue at the centre of the temple. Miss Fortune tried to make sense of it, but gave up when her eye kept getting lost in the many spirals and looping curves.

    “That’s not an answer.”

    “It’s the only one I have,” said Illaoi, setting her idol in a concave depression in the statue. She began moving in a circle around the statue, beating a rhythmic pattern on her thighs and chest with her fists. The people in the temple joined her circling, beating palms against bare skin, stamping their feet and speaking in a language she didn’t understand.

    “What are they doing?”

    “Giving some motion back to the world,” said Illaoi. “But we will need time.”

    “You’ll have it,” promised Miss Fortune.

    Lucian felt the spectral hooks bite deep into his flesh, colder than northern ice and twice as painful. The Chain Warden’s hand closed on his throat and his skin burned at the wraith’s touch. He felt his strength drawn from him, the beat of his heart slow.

    Thresh lifted him from the ground and held his lantern aloft, ready to receive his soul. The moaning lights within swirled in agitation, ghostly faces and hands pressing against the glass from within.

    “Long I have sought your soul, shadow hunter,” said Thresh. “But only now is it ripe for the taking.”

    Lucian’s vision greyed at the edges, feeling his soul peel away from his bones. He fought to hold on, but the Chain Warden had been harvesting souls for countless lifetimes and knew his craft better than any.

    “Struggle harder,” said Thresh with monstrous appetite. “Your soul burns brighter when you fight.”

    Lucian tried to speak, but no words came out, just a soft stream of warm breath that carried his soul.

    A glittering scythe floated in the air above Lucian, a murder-soaked reaper of souls. Its blade shivered with anticipation.

    Lucian...

    That voice. Her voice.

    My love...

    The murder-edge of Thresh’s blade turned, angled to better part soul from flesh.

    Lucian drew back his breath as he saw a face resolve in the glass of the lantern. One among countless thousands, but one with more reason than any to push herself to the fore.

    Full lips, wide, almond shaped eyes, imploring him to live.

    “Senna...” gasped Lucian.

    Let me be your shield.

    He knew what she meant in a heartbeat.

    The link between them was as strong as it had been when they hunted the creatures of shadow side by side.

    With the last of his strength, Lucian reached up and snapped the locket from around his neck. The chain glittered silver in the moonlight.

    The Chain Warden saw something was amiss and hissed in anger.

    Lucian was faster.

    He spun the chain like a slingshot, but instead of loosing a lead bullet, he lashed it around the arm holding the lantern. Before Thresh could shake it off, Lucian drew the silver awl from its sheath in his long coat and plunged it into the specter’s wrist.

    The Chain Warden screeched in pain, a sensation he had likely not felt in millennia. He dropped Lucian and thrashed in agony as the myriad souls trapped in his lantern suddenly found a means to strike back at their tormentor.

    Lucian felt his soul snap back into his body and drew in heaving gulps of air, like a drowning man breaking the surface.

    Hurry, my love. He is too strong...

    His sight returned, clearer than ever before. Lucian snatched his pistols from the ground. He caught the briefest glimpse of Senna’s face in the lantern and etched it on his heart.

    Never again would her face grow dim in his memories.

    “Thresh,” he said, aiming his twin pistols.

    The Chain Warden looked up, the voids of his eyes alight with outrage at the defiance of his captive souls. He held Lucian’s gaze and extended his lantern, but the rebellious souls had dispelled whatever protection it once offered.

    Lucian fired a blistering series of perfect shots.

    They burned through the Chain Warden’s ghostly robes and ignited his spirit form in a searing inferno of light. Lucian marched towards Thresh, his twin weapons blazing.

    Shrieking in agony, the Chain Warden retreated from Lucian’s unending barrage, his wraithform now powerless to resist these weapons of ancient power.

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

    Thresh gave one last howl before leaping from the bridge, falling like a burning comet to the city below.

    Lucian watched him fall until the Black Mist swallowed him.

    He slumped to his knees.

    “Thank you, my love,” said Lucian. “My light.”

    The temple walls shook with the violence of the assault. Black mist oozed between ill-fitting planks and through cracks in the scavenged glass of the windows. The door shuddered in its frame. Grasping claws of mist tore at the wood. Screams echoed as a howling gale battered the mismatched timbers of the roof.

    “Over there!” shouted Miss Fortune as a host of mist-creatures with burning red eyes poured through a broken section of wall that had once been a series of tea-chests from Ionia.

    She leapt into the midst of the wraiths. It felt like jumping naked into an ice hole cut in a glacier. Even the lightest touch of the dead leeched warmth and life.

    The coral pendant burned hot against her skin.

    She slashed her looted sword through the creatures and felt the same bite she’d felt before. Her bullets might be useless against the dead, but this Demacian blade hurt them. They fell back from her, screeching and hissing.

    Could the dead know fear?

    It seemed they could, for they fled the sword’s glittering edge. She didn’t let them go, stabbing and slashing the mist wherever it poured in.

    “That’s it! Run!” she yelled.

    A child screamed and Miss Fortune sprinted over as the mist reached to claim him. She dived and snatched the boy in her arms before rolling to safety. Chill claws plunged into her back, and Miss Fortune gasped as numbing cold spread through her limbs.

    She stabbed behind her and something dead howled.

    A woman sheltering behind an overturned pew reached for the boy and Miss Fortune let him squirm to safety. She pushed herself to her feet, weakness spreading through her body like a raging infection.

    Everywhere was gunfire and clashing steel, deathly howls and screams of terror.

    “Sarah!” shouted Rafen.

    She looked up to see the oaken locking bar securing the door split along its length. Rafen and a dozen men had their backs braced against the bludgeoning assault, but the doors were bulging inwards. Cracks spread and grasping hands of mist reached inside. A man was snatched backwards and his piteous screams were abruptly cut off as he vanished into the mist.

    Another had his arm ripped off as he reached to help him.

    Rafen spun and rammed his dagger through the gap.

    Clawed hands tore the useless weapon from his hand.

    A howling body pushed itself in through the disintegrating door and plunged its hands into Rafen’s chest. Her second in command roared in pain, his face draining of color.

    She staggered over to him, her strength all but gone. Her blade hacked through spectral arms, and the creature shrieked as it vanished. Rafen fell into her, and they collapsed back into the nave together.

    Rafen gasped for breath, his features as slack as hers.

    “Don’t you die on me, Rafen!” she wheezed.

    “It’ll take more than the dead to kill me,” he grunted. “Bastard thing just winded me.”

    Glass broke somewhere up above. Coils of black mist coalesced overhead, a boiling mass of snapping teeth, claws and hungry eyes.

    Miss Fortune tried to get to her feet, but her limbs burned with exhaustion. She ground her teeth in frustration. Barely a handful of her company remained, and the people sheltering in here weren’t fighters.

    The dead were getting in.

    Miss Fortune looked back at Illaoi.

    The priestess was surrounded by her people, all of them still circling the statue and performing their fist-thumping, palm-slapping ritual. It didn’t appear to be achieving anything. The strange statue remained unmoving and impotent.

    What had she expected, that it would come to life and drive the dead back like some clanking iron golem from Piltover?

    “Whatever it is you’re doing, do it faster!” shouted Miss Fortune.

    A section of the roof ripped loose and spun off into the tempest surrounding the temple. A swirling column of spirits boiled inside and touched down like a tornado. Wraiths and things that defied understanding spun from the unliving vortex to fall upon the living.

    Finally the door gave out and exploded inwards, the timbers dry and rotted by the touch of the dead. The skirling blast of a hunting horn filled the temple, and Miss Fortune’s hands flew to her ears at its deafening echoes.

    Hecarim rode into the temple, crushing the men who’d been bracing the door with their bodies. Their souls were drawn up into the Shadow of War’s flaming glaive, and the cold fire of its edge illuminated the temple with loathsome radiance. His death knights rode at his back, and the spirits already within the temple drew back in recognition of Hecarim’s terrible glory.

    “I said the dead are not welcome here,” boomed Illaoi.

    Miss Fortune looked up to see the priestess towering over her, stout and majestic. Pale light clung to her limbs and sparkled on the stone tablet she held in trembling hands. Veins stood out like hawsers on her neck, and her jawline was taut with effort. Sweat ran in runnels down her face.

    Whatever Illaoi was doing was costing her greatly.

    “These mortal souls are mine,” said Hecarim, and Miss Fortune felt herself recoil from the iron syllables of his voice.

    “They are not,” said Illaoi. “This is the house of Nagakabouros, who stands in opposition to the dead.”

    “The dead will have their due,” said Hecarim, lowering his glaive to point at Illaoi’s heart.

    The priestess shook her head.

    “Not today,” she said. “Not while I still move.”

    “You cannot stop me.”

    “Deaf as well as dead,” grinned Illaoi as a swelling radiance built behind her. “I didn’t say I was going to stop you.”

    Miss Fortune turned and saw the spiraling statue bathed in blinding radiance. White light smoked from its surfaces, and shadows fled from its touch. She shielded her eyes as the light billowed outwards like writhing tentacles and where it met the Black Mist it stripped it bare, exposing the twisted souls within. The sinuous light pulled the dead onwards, purging the baleful magic that cursed them to undeath so very long ago.

    She expected screams, but instead the unbound dead wept with joy as their souls were freed to move on. The light spread over the cracked walls of the temple, and as it touched her, Miss Fortune cried out as the deathly numbness in her flesh was banished in a rush of heat and life.

    The light of Nagakabouros closed on Hecarim, and Miss Fortune saw his fear at the thought of what transformations it might work upon him.

    What could be so awful that it was better to remain cursed?

    “You can be free, Hecarim,” said Illaoi, her voice strained to the limits of endurance by what she had unleashed. “You can move on, live in the light as the man you always dreamed of being before his grief and folly remade you.”

    Hecarim roared and swept his glaive at Illaoi’s neck.

    Miss Fortune’s blade intercepted it in a clashing flare of sparks. She shook her head.

    “Get out of my city,” she said.

    Hecarim’s blade drew back for another strike, but before the blow could land, the light finally pierced his veil of darkness. He bellowed in pain and fell back from its burning touch. The dark rider’s outline shimmered, like two picture box images wavering in candlelight on the same backcloth.

    Miss Fortune caught a fleeting glimpse of a tall rider, armored in silver and gold. A young man, handsome and proud with dark eyes and a future of glory ahead of him.

    What happened to him?

    Hecarim roared and galloped from the temple.

    His death knights and the darkness went with him, a shrieking host of tattered spirits following in their wake.

    The light of Nagakabouros spread over Bilgewater like the coming dawn. None who saw it could ever remember so sweet a sight; the first rays of sunlight after a storm, the first hint of warmth after a bitter winter.

    The Black Mist withdrew before it, roiling in a churning maelstrom of panicked spirits. The dead turned on one another in a frenzy, some fighting to return from whence they had come as others actively sought out the light’s release.

    Silence fell as the Black Mist drew back over the ocean, drawn to the cursed island where it claimed dominion.

    True dawn broke over the eastern horizon, and a cleansing wind blew through the city as the people of Bilgewater let out a collective breath.

    The Harrowing was over.

    Silence filled the temple; the utter lack of sound a stark contrast to the mayhem of moments ago.

    “It’s done,” said Miss Fortune.

    “Until the next time,” said Illaoi wearily. “The Black Mist’s hunger burns like a sickness.”

    “What did you do?”

    “What I had to.”

    “Whatever it was, I thank you.”

    Illaoi shook her head and put a powerful arm around Miss Fortune’s shoulder.

    “Thank the goddess,” said Illaoi. “Make an offering. Something big.”

    “I will,” said Miss Fortune.

    “You better. My god dislikes empty promises.”

    The veiled threat rankled, and for a moment she thought of putting a bullet through the priestess’ skull. Before she could do more than inch her hand to her pistols, Illaoi crumpled like a ripped topsail. Miss Fortune grabbed for her, but the priestess was too enormous to hold upright alone.

    They went to the seashell floor together.

    “Rafen, help me get her up,” she said.

    Together they propped Illaoi up against a broken pew, grunting with the effort of shifting her colossal bulk.

    “The Bearded Lady rose from the sea...” said Rafen.

    “Don’t be stupid all your life,” said Illaoi. “I said Nagakabouros doesn’t live under the sea.”

    “So where does she live?” asked Rafen. “In the sky?”

    Illaoi shook her head and punched him in the heart. Rafen grunted and winced in pain.

    “There is where you find her.”

    Illaoi grinned at the obliqueness of her answer and her eyes drifted closed.

    “Is she dead?” asked Rafen, rubbing his bruised chest.

    Illaoi reached up and slapped him.

    Then started snoring like a stevedore with lung-blight.

    Lucian sat on the edge of the bridge and watched the city emerge from Black Mist. He’d hated Bilgewater on first sight, but there was a quality of beauty to it as the sunlight bathed its myriad clay-tiled roofs in a warm amber glow.

    A city reborn, like it was every time the Harrowing receded.

    An apt name for this dread moment, but one that carried only a fraction of the sorrow of its origins. Did anyone here really understand the real tragedy of the Shadow Isles?

    And even if they did, would they care?

    He turned as he heard footsteps approaching.

    “It’s kind of pretty from up here,” said Miss Fortune.

    “But only from up here.”

    “Yes, it’s a viper’s nest alright,” said Miss Fortune. “There’s good people and bad people, but I’ve been making sure there’s a lot less of the bad.”

    “The way I hear it, you started a war,” said Lucian. “Some might say that’s like burning down your house to kill a rat.”

    He saw anger touch her, but it passed quickly.

    “I thought I was making things better for everyone,” she said, straddling the parapet, “but they’re only getting worse. I need to do something about that, starting now.”

    “Is that why you were out in the Black Mist?”

    The woman thought for a moment.

    “Maybe not at first,” she said. “I let a razor-eel off the hook when I killed Gangplank, and if I don’t take hold of it and get it back on, it’s going to bite a lot of the good people.”

    “A razor-eel?”

    “What I mean to say is that when I brought the Pirate King down, I had no idea what would happen when he was gone. I didn’t much care,” she said. “But I’ve seen what’s happening down there without someone in control. The city’s tearing its own throat out. Bilgewater needs someone strong at the top. No reason that someone can’t be me. The war’s just starting, and the only way it’ll end quickly is if I win it.”

    The silence between them stretched.

    “My answer is no.”

    “I didn’t ask anything.”

    “You’re going to,” said Lucian. “You want me to stay and help you win your war, but I can’t. Your fight isn’t my fight.”

    “It could be,” said Miss Fortune. “The pay’s good and you’d get to kill a lot of bad people. And save a lot of innocent souls.”

    “There is only one soul I need to save,” said Lucian. “And I won’t save it in Bilgewater.”

    Miss Fortune nodded and held out her hand.

    “Then I’ll say farewell and good hunting,” she said, standing and dusting her britches. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. Just know that you can lose yourself to revenge.”

    Lucian watched her limp back to the sagging ruins of the temple as the survivors within emerged, blinking, into the daylight. She thought she understood what drove him, but she hadn’t the first clue.

    Vengeance? He was far beyond vengeance.

    His beloved was held in torment by an undying wraith, a creature from ancient days that understood suffering like no other.

    Miss Fortune did not understand even a fraction of his pain.

    He rose and lifted his gaze out to sea.

    The ocean was calm now, an emerald green expanse.

    People were already moving down on the docks, repairing ships and rebuilding their homes. Bilgewater never stopped, even in the aftermath of the Harrowing. He scanned the forest of swaying masts, looking for a ship that wasn’t too badly damaged. Perhaps one desperate captain could be persuaded to take him where he needed to go.

    “I am coming, my light,” he said. “And I will free you.”

    The fisherman grunted as he worked the stern-windlass to haul the big man from the water and onto his boat. The rope was frayed and he sweated in the cold air as he worked the crank.

    “By the bristles of her bearded chin, you’re a big bastard, right sure ye are,” he said, snagging the big man’s armor with a gaffing hook and pulling him around over the rolling deck. He kept a wary eye out for predators, above and below the surface.

    No sooner had the Black Mist withdrawn over the horizon than scores of boats put out to sea. The waters were awash with plunder, and if you weren’t fast, you ended up with nothing.

    He’d spotted the floating man first and had already fought off six sewer-jacks trying to reach him. Damned if wharf-scum like them were going to steal this ocean bounty from him.

    The big man had been drifting on a bed of what looked like the remains of a giant Krakenwyrm. Its tentacles were pulped and bloated with noxious gasses, which was all that had kept the big man’s armored form afloat.

    He dropped his catch to the deck and laid him out along the gunwale before casting an appraising eye over his body.

    A heavy iron hauberk of ring and scale, rugged, fur-lined boots and, best of all, a magnificent axe tangled in the straps of his armor.

    “Oh, yes, make a few Krakens out of you, me beauty,” he said, dancing a happy jig around his boat. “A few Krakens indeed!”

    The big man coughed up brackish seawater.

    “Am I still alive?” he asked.

    The fisherman stopped his happy jig and slid a hand towards the long knife at his belt. He used it to open fish bellies. No reason he couldn’t use it to open a throat. Wouldn’t be the first time a salvager had helped someone on their way to the Bearded Lady to claim a prize.

    The big man opened his eyes.

    “Touch that knife again and I’ll cut you into more pieces than that damned Krakenwyrm.”

  2. Kalista

    Kalista

    In life, Kalista was a proud general, niece to the king of an empire that none now recall. She lived by a strict code of honor, serving the throne with utmost loyalty. The king had many enemies, and when they sent an assassin to slay him, it was Kalista’s vigilance that averted disaster.

    But in saving the king, she damned the one he loved most—the assassin’s deflected blade was envenomed, and sliced the arm of the queen. The greatest priests and surgeons were summoned, but none could draw the poison from her body. Wracked with grief, the king dispatched Kalista in search of a cure, with Hecarim of the Iron Order taking her place at his side.

    Kalista traveled far, consulting learned scholars, hermits and mystics… but to no avail. Finally, she learned of a place protected from the outside world by shimmering pale mists, whose inhabitants were rumored to know the secrets of eternal life. She set sail on one last voyage of hope, to the almost legendary Blessed Isles.

    The guardians of the capital city Helia saw the purity of Kalista’s intent, and parted the mists to allow her safe passage. She begged them to heal the queen, and after much consideration, the masters of the city agreed. Time was of the essence. While the queen yet breathed, there was hope for her in the fabled Waters of Life. Kalista was given a talisman that would allow her to return to Helia unaided, but was warned against sharing this knowledge with any other.

    However, by the time Kalista reached the shores of her homeland, the queen was already dead.

    The king had descended into madness, locking himself in his tower with the queen’s festering corpse. When he learned of Kalista’s return, he demanded to know what she had found. With a heavy heart, for she had never before failed him, she admitted that the cure she had found would be of no use. The king would not believe this, and condemned Kalista as a traitor to the crown.

    It was Hecarim who persuaded her to lead them to the Blessed Isles, where her uncle could hear the truth of it from the masters themselves. Then, perhaps, he would find peace—even if only in accepting that the queen was gone, and allowing her to be laid to rest. Hesitantly, Kalista agreed.

    And so the king set out with a flotilla of his fastest ships, and cried out in joy as the glittering city of Helia was revealed to him. However, they were met by the stern masters, who would not allow them to pass. Death, they insisted, was final. To cheat it would be to break the natural order of the world.

    The king flew into a fevered rage, and commanded Kalista to slay any who opposed them. She refused, and called on Hecarim to stand with her… but instead he drove his spear through her armored back.

    The Iron Order joined him in this treachery, piercing Kalista’s body a dozen times more as she fell. A brutal melee erupted, with those devoted to Kalista fighting desperately against Hecarim’s knights, but their numbers were too few. As Kalista’s life faded, and she watched her warriors die, swearing vengeance with her final breath…

    When next Kalista opened her eyes, they were filled with the dark power of unnatural magic. She had no idea what had transpired, but the city of Helia had been transformed into a twisted mockery of its former beauty—indeed, the entirety of the Blessed Isles was now a place of shadow and darkness, filled with howling spirits trapped for all eternity in the nightmare of undeath.

    Though she tried to cling to those fragmented memories of Hecarim’s monstrous betrayal, they have slowly faded in all the centuries since, and all that now remains is a thirst for revenge burning in Kalista’s ruined chest. She has become a specter, a figure of macabre folklore, often invoked by those who have suffered similar treacheries.

    These wretched spirits are subsumed into hers, to pay the ultimate price—becoming one with the Spear of Vengeance.

  3. Hecarim

    Hecarim

    Born into an empire long since gone to dust and forgotten, Hecarim was a lieutenant of the Iron Order—a brotherhood sworn to defend their king’s lands.

    As Hecarim won victory after victory from the back of his mighty warhorse, the commander of the Iron Order saw in him a potential successor… but also a growing darkness. His obsessive hunger for glory was eroding his honor, and over time the knight-commander came to realize this young lieutenant must never lead them.

    When he was told this, Hecarim was furious. Even so, he bit back his anger, and continued in his duties.

    When they next rode to war, the commander found himself surrounded by enemies, and cut off from his fellow knights. Hecarim, seeing his chance, turned away and left him to die. At battle’s end, the Iron Order, oblivious to what Hecarim had done, knelt on the bloody ground and swore allegiance to him.

    Hecarim rode to the capital to take his formal oaths, and met with Kalista, the king’s most trusted general. She recognized his prowess and leadership, and when the queen was wounded by an assassin’s poisoned blade, Kalista was comforted to know the Iron Order would remain with the king while she sought a cure.

    Gripped by paranoia, and seeing new threats in every shadow, the king raged at those he believed were trying to separate him from his dying wife, and dispatched Hecarim to quell dissent throughout the kingdom. The Iron Order earned a dreadful reputation as ruthless enforcers of the king’s will. Towns and villages burned. Hundreds were put to the sword.

    With grim inevitability, when the queen died, Hecarim chose to sour the king’s grief into hatred, seeking sanction to lead the Iron Order into foreign lands. He would avenge her death, while earning yet more dark renown for himself.

    But before they could ride out, Kalista returned. She had found what she sought upon the distant Blessed Isles—and yet it was now too late. The king would not believe this, and had Kalista imprisoned as a traitor. Intrigued by what he had heard, Hecarim visited her cell, and they spoke of the pale mists that protected the islands from all invaders… and also of the inhabitants’ immense wealth, including the legendary Waters of Life.

    Knowing only Kalista could lead them there, Hecarim eventually persuaded her to guide the king’s fleet through the veil that concealed the Blessed Isles from mortal sight.

    They landed at the city of Helia with the queen’s body in solemn procession. The Iron Order led the way, only to be met by the city’s masters, who now refused to help. Enraged, the king ordered Kalista to kill them, but she refused, and Hecarim smiled as he made the decision that would damn him for eternity. He drove a spear through Kalista’s back, and ordered his knights to ransack the city, looting its vaults of arcane treasures.

    Amid the chaos, a lowly custodian agreed to grant the king access to the Waters of Life—but not even this could distract Hecarim from the revelry of bloodshed, and so it was that the Ruination of the Blessed Isles would take him almost completely by surprise.

    A blastwave of magical force tore across Helia, shattering every last building and leaving the fragments suspended in searing un-light. In its wake came the Black Mist, a billowing hurricane that dragged every living creature it touched into its shrieking, roiling embrace. Hecarim tried to rally the Iron Order, hoping to make it back to their ships, but the mist claimed them one by one as they fled.

    Alone, and defiant to the end, the knight-commander was taken by the shadows. He and his mighty steed were fused into a monstrous, spectral abomination that reflected the darkness in Hecarim’s heart—a brazen creature of fury and spite, at one with the Black Mist and yet utterly enslaved by it.

    Bound forevermore to these Shadow Isles, Hecarim has spent centuries in a sinister mockery of his former life, cursed to patrol the nightmarish lands he once intended to conquer. Whenever the Black Mist reaches out beyond their shores, he and the otherworldly host of the Iron Order ride out to slaughter the living, in memory of glories long passed.

  4. Lucian

    Lucian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Deep Breath

    Deep Breath

    They think Zaun is where the losers live.

    They won’t admit it, of course – they’ll smile through their teeth and pat us on the back and tell us that Piltover would be nowhere without Zaun. Our hard workers! Our bustling trade! Our chemtech that everyone in Piltover pretends they don’t buy, except they constantly do! Zaun is a vital part of Piltover’s culture, they’ll say.

    All lies. Obviously.

    They think Zaun is where the idiots go. People too stupid to make it in Piltover’s golden towers.

    People like me.

    I spent months dealing shimmer so I could afford to apply for Clan Holloran’s apprenticeship. I studied every crusty, dog-eared book I could find on gearwork machinery. I built a prototype gearbrace for people with broken or arthritic wrists that increased their mobility. I did everything I could have done to earn an apprenticeship in Piltover. I even made it to the final stage of the vetting process: a face-to-face meeting with Boswell Holloran himself.

    They said it was a formality. Just a way to welcome me to the family.

    He entered the room, looked down at my Gray-stained clothes, and laughed a strangled, joyless laugh. He said, “Sorry, my boy – we don’t take sump-rats here.”

    He never even sat down.

    So now I’m back here. In Zaun. One more idiot.

    The Gray rolls through the streets, welcoming me back. Most days, it’s thin enough that you can breathe deep without coughing up something wet. Today, though, is what we call a Grayout. You choke with every breath. Your chest feels tight. Can’t see much past your fingertips. I want to run, but I know there’s nowhere to run to. The Gray feels like it’s closing in on me, crushing me, smothering me.

    These are the times I pray to Janna.

    Not everyone in Zaun believes she’s real, but my mother always had faith. She told me a bluebird hovered outside her window on the day of my birth, and she knew – she knew – it was Janna telling her I was going to be fine.

    She was wrong, of course. I wasn’t fine, in the end. Couple of years ago, she – my mother – died while sump-scrapping, and I had to raise myself with the few gears she left me. Then, the usual: couldn’t make friends. Got beaten up a lot. Boy I loved didn’t love me back. Tried to study, tried to think my way up to Piltover. Couldn’t. Figured Janna had forgotten about me.

    But I still keep the pendant my mother gave me: a wooden engraving depicting the bluebird she saw. Just in case of moments like these.

    So I sit on the wet ground because I don’t care enough to find a bench, and I take out the bluebird pendant I always keep tucked in my shirt, and I talk to Janna.

    Not out loud, of course – don’t need people thinking I’m some chem-burnt freak – but still, I talk to her.

    I don’t ask her for anything. I just tell her about my day, and the day before that, and how scared I am that I’ll never become anything worthwhile and that I’ll die down here knee-deep in the Sump with nothing to show for it just like my mother, and that sometimes I just want to run away somewhere I can breathe and stop being so frightened and not feel like crying all the time and how I hate myself for feeling like I want to cry because I have it so much easier than some other people, and how sometimes I think about throwing myself into the chem pools of the Sump, just throwing myself in with my mother where I’d let myself sink to the bottom and my lungs would fill with fluid because then it’d be over, at least. I tell Janna I hope she’s okay. I hope she’s happy, wherever she is.

    That’s when I feel the breeze caress my cheek. Just a light flutter, but it’s there. Soon, I can feel it blow hair across my face. The wind whistles loud and fast, and soon it’s whipping my coat in the air and I feel as though I’m at the center of a maelstrom.

    The Gray swirls before me, pushed up by a breeze that seems to flow from everywhere at once. The fog slowly dissipates, and I can see other passersby on the Entresol level watching it float away.

    The wind stops.

    The Gray clears.

    I can breathe.

    Not just small, cautious gasps, but deep breaths that fill my lungs with cold, fresh air. No longer veiled in Gray, the sun shines past the towers of Piltover into Zaun itself.

    I can see the Piltovans above, peering down at us. Without the Gray clouding their view, they can see us from their lofty bridges and balconies. I don’t think they like it very much. Nobody wants to be reminded they live above a slum; I see a few scowls.

    That’s when I see him again: Boswell Holloran. Holding a sweetcake in his hand, looking down at me again. An expression of disgust on his face, just like before.

    I’m so busy staring at his contemptuous face that I don’t notice the presence behind me until her hand is on my shoulder.

    “It’s okay,” she says, and I know without turning who it is.

    She squeezes my shoulder, then kneels and crosses her arms in front of my chest, pulling me into a hug.

    “It’s going to be okay,” she says.

    Strands of her hair fall onto my shoulders. She smells like the air after a long rain.

    “It might not be okay now. You might not be okay for a while. And that’s fine. But someday, without knowing exactly when or why or how it happened, you’ll feel happy,” she says. My face is warm and wet and I don’t know when I started crying but it’s a relief, like the clouds are clearing, and I hold her arms and she holds me, just telling me over and over that it’s okay, that she’s here, that things will be better.

    I don’t know how long she holds me, but soon I see everyone on Zaun’s Entresol and the balconies of Piltover above are staring.

    Before I can say anything, she says, “Don’t think about them. Just take care of yourself. Will you do that for me?”

    I try to speak, but instead I just nod.

    “Thank you,” she says, and she kisses my wet cheek and gives me one last, quick squeeze.

    She rises and glides past me. For the first time, I see her in her entirety – a tall, ethereal figure that I would’ve assumed was from my imagination if she hadn’t just touched me. I notice her long, pointed ears. Feet that don’t touch the ground. Hair flowing in the wind, even right now when there isn’t any. Eyes so blue I feel a little cold just looking at her.

    But then she smiles, winks, and says, “You’ll want to watch this next part.”

    There’s a massive gust of wind, so fast and sharp I have to cover my eyes. When I open them again she’s gone, but the wind is still blowing. It blows up toward Piltover and its gawking citizens.

    It whistles as it picks up speed and strength, and the Pilties run for cover but it’s too late, the breeze hits them full force, sending their frocks sailing and mussing their hair. Boswell Holloran shrieks in terror as the wind launches him off the balcony.

    It seems as if he’s about to plummet toward certain death, but another gust of wind shoots up toward him, and his descent slows significantly, as if the wind is guiding him down. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, though. Even though he’s falling with all the velocity of a tumbling leaf, He screams the entire way down. Very high pitched. Very undignified.

    His clothes flap upward, smacking him in the face as he descends, until he’s hovering a few inches above a puddle.

    “I –,” he begins, before the wind disappears altogether and he plops ass-first into the puddle, ruining what I assume was a very expensive ensemble. He yelps in a mixture of surprise, pain, and irritation, splashing around like an angry child. He tries to get to his feet, only to slip and fall back down all over again. If I’m being completely honest, he looks like an idiot.

    And I can’t stop laughing.

  6. Yone

    Yone

    In life, Yone adhered to a strict code of honor and duty. Even as a child, his love for his family led him to assume the mantle of protector, motivated in no small way by the loss of his father. This was in stark contrast to his half-brother, Yasuo, who was brash and reckless where Yone was patient and disciplined.

    Still, the two were inseparable—and when Yone began his studies at the renowned sword school near their village, Yasuo followed.

    As they trained, Yone was often forced to temper his younger brother’s impulsiveness. However, when Yasuo refused the personal tutelage of Elder Souma, master of the legendary wind technique, Yone gifted him a maple seed—a symbol of humility—as a sign of his support and encouragement.

    Yone was proud of his brother, but he had doubts about the wise master’s judgment, fearing that Yasuo’s impulsive nature would make him a poor student. But Elder Souma was well respected, and did not make careless decisions.

    Putting his concerns aside, Yone continued to practice with dual blades, his prowess quickly earning the respect and admiration of his fellow disciples. Though Yone’s skill was unmatched, Yasuo’s use of the wind technique made their sparring sessions a sight to behold, and a joy to the brothers themselves.

    But that joy did not last long. War came to Ionia.

    Yone, along with many other disciples, left to defend against the approaching Noxian forces while Yasuo reluctantly stayed behind to protect his master. But one fateful night, Elder Souma was discovered dead—slain by the very wind technique that he taught.

    When Yone returned, he found that Yasuo had fled.

    This shook Yone to his core. His fears were proven true—Elder Souma had been wrong.

    Yone blamed himself. If Yasuo had murdered Souma, Yone had failed to teach him the righteous path. If Yasuo had simply abandoned his post and allowed his master to die, then Yone had failed to instill him with discipline. Either way, Yasuo had already killed several of those who pursued him—and to Yone, their blood stained his own hands as much as his brother’s.

    He tracked Yasuo down. When their swords finally crossed, Yone’s steel was unmatched… but Yasuo’s mastery of the wind cut his brother down.

    Death, however, was not the end. When Yone awoke within the spirit realm, the weight of his failure crushed him. His fury flared, and he pounded his fists on the ground in rage.

    A rumbling laugh pierced his thoughts. He turned, and beheld a monstrous, humanoid spirit with a blood-red blade. It was a powerful azakana, a predatory entity that had long stalked Yone from beyond the veil.

    Before Yone could speak, it struck.

    He drew the spiritual echoes of his blades to his side just in time to block the attack. He once again found himself in a duel where his swordsmanship was unparalleled, but he was overwhelmed by magic.

    Anger consumed him. A lifetime of honor and duty snapped. In one furious moment, Yone wrested the azakana’s blade from it and ran the creature through.

    The last thing he heard before a new darkness took him was that same rumbling laughter…

    As he came to, Yone found himself back in the material realm, though it was a grim shadow of what it had been. He struggled to his feet, the spirit realm hazy in his mind, and a blood-red sword in his hand. Upon his head, a mask had coalesced in the form of the azakana’s face—he could not remove it, but he could now see other azakana through its eyes. They were not yet true demons, content to feed on negativity before eventually manifesting to devour their hosts. But, as Yone would discover, if an azakana’s name was learned, they could be reduced to inert masks of personified emotion.

    Even so, he could not tell if—or when—the azakana he wore would reawaken to consume him. In life, Yone had worn the mask of protector, brother, and disciple for so long that it had become his identity. But now, in moments of stillness, he swears he can feel the mask shifting upon his face, his own past and unresolved conflict with Yasuo now paling in comparison to this new threat.

    Yone hunts these insidious creatures in an attempt to understand what he has become—with each name bringing him a step closer to uncovering that of the one whose laughter still haunts him.

    Nothing else matters. There is only the chase of truth.

  7. Thresh

    Thresh

    The horrifying specter now known as Thresh was once a simple, if troubled, man. In an age history has all but forgotten, he was a lowly warden of an order devoted to the gathering and protection of arcane knowledge. This order was established on the Blessed Isles, which were hidden and protected from the outside world by magical pale mists.

    The masters of the order acknowledged Thresh’s long years of service, and tasked him with the custodianship of certain hidden vaults beneath the city of Helia. It was there that a vast, secret collection of dangerous artifacts was kept under lock and key. Incredibly strong-willed and methodical, Thresh was well suited to such work… but even then, his penchant for cruelty had been noted by his brethren. While it had not yet manifested in murderous ways—at least, none that could be proven—he was shunned by many.

    It became clear he had been given a job that kept him away from others, preventing him from gaining the recognition he felt he deserved. Solitary years in the darkness took their toll, and Thresh grew ever more bitter and jealous as he patrolled the long halls with his lantern-stave, and only his own resentful thoughts for company.

    His moment of opportunity came when the armies of a mad king managed to pierce the veiling mists, and arrived unbidden upon the shores of the Blessed Isles.

    Secretly, Thresh delighted in the slaughter that followed. The invading king was obsessed with resurrecting his dead queen—and Thresh willingly led him to the fabled Waters of Life.

    None but the most senior members of the order had ever been permitted to enter the hidden catacomb that housed the Waters. Now, with the king’s greatest warriors at his back, Thresh laughed as the guardians of that sacred place were cut down before him. Finally, he believed, he would get what he had long deserved.

    Only those who were there could say what truly occurred when the king lowered the lifeless corpse of his wife into the Waters, but the aftermath would shake the whole of Runeterra.

    A catastrophic blastwave of dark energy surged outward, engulfing Helia and spreading rapidly across the rest of the Blessed Isles, and the white mist that had once protected them turned black and predatory. Every living thing in its path perished in an instant, and yet their spirits could not move on, caught in a horrifying new existence somewhere between life and death. Thresh himself was among the first to be claimed… but while others screamed in anguish at their fate, he reveled in it.

    He arose from this cataclysm, this Ruination, as a spectral monstrosity, relishing the chance to torment others without fear of reprisal, and unfettered by the limits of mortality.

    Over the decades and centuries that followed, his supernatural appearance slowly changed to match the malice and cruelty that had always festered in his heart. To his amusement, Thresh came to realize most other spirits trapped within the Black Mist retained only fragments of their former selves—even the strongest of the foreign invaders, such as Hecarim or Ledros—while his power continued to grow.

    Driven by spite to prey upon those he perceives as lesser souls, Thresh’s favorite victims have always been those who will suffer the most from his attentions. No matter how strong their resolve, resilience, or faith, he strives to break them as slowly as possible, by learning their fears and weaknesses, and toying with them to the very end. Only when their lives lie in tatters, their loved ones taken from them, their sense of purpose lost and their last glimmer of hope snuffed out, do Thresh’s hooked chains finally drag them into his undying grasp.

    Even so, death brings no merciful release, for he tears out the souls of all he kills—imprisoning them within his accursed lantern, to be unwilling witnesses to his depredations for all eternity.

    Only a single soul has ever escaped him.

    Senna, one of the hated “Sentinels of Light”, died a futile death after facing Thresh in some forgotten eldritch vault. Her distraught husband, Lucian, then pursued the cruel spirit for years, becoming singularly obsessed with the hunt, letting his grief and rage consume him almost entirely. To Thresh, it was delectable.

    However, before he could finally claim Lucian’s soul, a vengeful blow split Thresh’s lantern open, and freed Senna from it.

    Intrigued by the obvious strength of their mortal bond, he has decided to allow them this small and insignificant victory, knowing all too well that the game of light and shadow they all play is still far from over…

  8. Invocation

    Invocation

    The sword-wife stood amid the burnt out ruin of her home. Everything and everyone that mattered to her was gone, and she was filled with fathomless grief... and hate. Hate was now all that compelled her.

    She saw again the smile on his face as he gave the order. He was meant to be their protector, but he’d spat upon his vows. Hers was not the only family shattered by the oath-breaker.

    The desire to go after him was strong. She wanted nothing more than to plant her sword in his chest and watch the life drain from his eyes... but she knew she would never be able to get close enough to him. He was guarded day and night, and she was but one warrior. She would never be able to fight her way through his battalion alone. Such a death would serve no purpose.

    She took a shuddering breath, knowing there was no coming back.

    A crude effigy of a man, formed of sticks and twine, lay upon a fire-blackened dresser. Its body was wrapped in a scrap of cloth torn from the cloak of the betrayer. She’d pried it from her husband’s dead grasp. Alongside it was a hammer and three rusted nails.

    She gathered everything up and moved to the threshold. The door itself was gone, smashed to splinters in the attack. Beyond, lit by moonlight, lay the empty, darkened fields.

    Reaching up, the sword-wife pressed the stick-effigy to the hardwood lintel.

    “I invoke thee, Lady of Vengeance,” she said, her voice low, trembling with the depth of her fury. “From beyond the veil, hear my plea. Come forth. Let justice be done.”

    She readied her hammer and the first of the nails.

    “I name my betrayer once,” she said, and spoke his name aloud. As she did so, she placed the tip of the first nail to the chest of the stick-figure. With a single strike, she hammered it in deep, pinning it to the hardwood door frame.

    The sword-wife shivered. The room had become markedly colder. Or had she imagined it?

    “I name him twice,” she said, and she did so, hammering the second nail alongside the first.

    Her gaze dropped, and she jolted in shock. A dark figure stood out in the moonlit field, a hundred yards in the distance. It was utterly motionless. Breathing quicker, the sword-wife returned her attention to the unfinished task.

    “I name him thrice,” she said, speaking again the name of the murderer of her husband and children, before hammering home the final nail.

    An ancient spirit of vengeance stood before her, filling the doorway, and the sword-wife staggered back, gasping involuntarily.

    The otherworldly being was clad in archaic armor, her flesh translucent and glowing with spectral un-light. Black Mist coiled around her like a living shroud.

    With a squeal of tortured metal, the spectral figure drew forth the blackened spear protruding from her breastplate — the ancient weapon that had ended her life.

    She threw it to the ground before the sword-wife. No words were spoken; there was no need. The sword-wife knew what was being offered to her — vengeance — and knew its terrible cost: her soul.

    The spirit watched on, her face impassive and her eyes burning with an unrelenting cold fury, as the sword-wife picked up the treacherous weapon.

    “I pledge myself to vengeance,” said the sword-wife, her voice quivering. She reversed the spear, aiming the tip inward, towards her heart. “I pledge it with my blood. I pledge it with my soul.”

    She paused. Her husband would have pleaded for her to turn away from this path. He would have begged her not to condemn her soul for theirs. A moment of doubt gnawed at her. The undying specter watched on.

    The sword-wife’s eyes narrowed as she thought of her husband lying dead, cut down by swords and axes. She thought again of her children, sprawled upon the ground, and her resolve hardened like a cold stone in her heart. Her grip tightened upon the spear.

    “Help me,” she implored, her decision made. “Please, help me kill him.”

    She rammed the spear into her chest, driving it in deep.

    The sword-wife’s eyes widened and she dropped to her knees. She tried to speak, but only blood bubbled from her lips.

    The ghostly apparition watched her die, her expression impassive.

    As the last of the lifeblood ran from her body, the shade of the sword-wife climbed to her feet. She looked down at her insubstantial hands in wonder, then at her own corpse lying dead-eyed in a growing pool of blood upon the floor. The shade’s expression hardened, and a ghostly sword appeared in her hand.

    An ethereal tether, little more than a wisp of light, linked the newly formed shade to the avenging spirit she had summoned. Through their bond, the sword-wife saw her differently, glimpsing the noble warrior she had been in life: tall and proud, her armor gleaming. Her posture was confident, yet without arrogance; a born leader, a born soldier. This was a commander the sword-wife would have willingly bled for.

    Behind the spirit’s anger, she sensed her empathy — recognition of their shared pain of betrayal.

    “Your cause is our cause,” said Kalista, the Spear of Vengeance. Her voice was grave cold. “We walk the path of vengeance as one, now.”

    The sword-wife nodded.

    With that, the avenging spirit and the shade of the sword-wife stepped into the darkness and were gone.

  9. Sisterhood of War Part II: The Unquiet Dead

    Sisterhood of War Part II: The Unquiet Dead

    Ian St. Martin

    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.

  10. Redeemed

    Redeemed

    Phillip Vargas

    Senna woke with a gasp, her breath pluming in the frigid night. Slicked with sweat, her arms, legs, neck, and back were covered in a mantle of sand. A single thought tumbled through her mind.

    You need to reach Bilgewater.

    She sat up, and saw the dark waters of the Holnek streaming past the lonely riverbank. Her instincts were pulling at her again, speaking to her as they had since childhood. She had learned long ago to trust those feelings and hunches—and now they were telling her to leave.

    Lucian stirred in his sleep. He turned and pulled their bedroll away, leaving her bare. A gentle breeze chilled her skin even more, and she burrowed her toes in the sand, searching for warmth.

    There was an unusual ebb in Harrowings, and so they had traveled north, to south-east Valoran, sailing upriver until they neared the Noxian border. The pair had spent a short respite together in solitude, far from the storm that was their lives, a chance to rediscover one another after years of being apart. It was comfortable, like a well-worn cloak. Her instincts were ripping her away from the only refuge she and Lucian had known since they were reunited.

    She swallowed the knot growing in her throat, and closed her eyes, searching her heart, hoping that she had misunderstood, that her instincts weren’t so cruel, that they could be bargained with.

    But the feeling remained.

    She stared at the vast darkness and felt the glare of countless stars—each one like a wretched soul waiting for deliverance, watching in silence as she lived the life they were denied. She had no right to squander salvation, these precious moments spent with Lucian.

    He’ll understand.

    Lucian moaned softly in his sleep, head resting on a leather-bound tome. His breath quickened as he tossed beneath the bedroll, the moans growing louder. Senna shook his shoulder until he startled awake. He pushed himself up on his elbow, breathing heavily. As he readjusted to the waking world, he stared at her, through her, still seeing the woman from his nightmare, the one he failed to save from Thresh’s lantern, her years of imprisonment and torture. He took another deep breath, and relief settled in his eyes.

    “Sorry,” he said, offering her the bedroll.

    They watched the horizon. A radiant edge of purple and indigo heralded the approaching dawn.

    You need to tell him.

    Reluctantly, Senna turned to Lucian. “It’s time to go.”

    “We were just getting settled in,” he said, still looking out across the water. He let out a heavy sigh. “Where to?”

    “Bilgewater.”

    He shook his head. “If there’s a Harrowing, it’ll be over before we ever reach port.”

    There’s still time.

    “If we leave now, we could be there in a few days,” Senna said.

    “There’ll be nothing to do but bury the dead.”

    Senna tensed at the bluntness of his words, the easy disregard of their duty as Sentinels of Light. But she knew it wasn’t that simple—his feelings ran deeper, and his lapse would be momentary. “There’s still a chance,” she insisted. “I can feel it.”

    Lucian said nothing.

    His heart is elsewhere.

    She looked at the codex lying on the sand, its bronze clasp broken and pitted with age. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have come this far north,” she said. “It was careless.”

    The ancient manuscript was Lucian’s latest acquisition, and the reason they had initially sailed to the region. He had procured it in Krexor, hoping it would reveal a way to end her curse, to free her of the Black Mist that had pursued her relentlessly since childhood—drawn to a spark of unnatural life that had infected her when she meddled with a force she didn’t understand. There were dozens of such volumes on their ship.

    She’d often awoken at night, alone in their bedroll. She, shrouded in darkness. He, illuminated by candlelight, hunched over a tome, desperately seeking answers to questions she had long stopped asking.

    Lucian finally turned to Senna. “There hasn’t been a Harrowing in months,” he said. The warmth had returned to his face, along with a tinge of remorse. “I wanted us to rest, if only for a while.”

    A piece of Senna’s heart wanted nothing more. She longed to forget the horrors of the Black Mist, to look up at the night sky and see only stars.

    “I know,” she said. “We both did.”

    Lucian picked up the heavy codex and started to rise. Senna felt the chasm widen between them, leaving her alone on the other side. She took his hand, holding him fast. “We’ll start after dawn,” she said.

    He sat back down on the sand, and they watched the sunrise.



    They had broken camp shortly after dawn. Senna was hauling the last of their provisions up a narrow gangplank while Lucian untied the halyard, preparing to hoist the mainsail. They worked in silence, each lost in their own thoughts as the ship swayed in the calm waters of the Holnek.

    She planted a wooden crate on the weathered deck, next to their other supplies. Their stores had dwindled during their stay. “We’ll need to resupply before heading to Bilgewater.”

    Lucian nodded. “We can sail down the coast and provision in Holdrum, but we’ll also need to anchor at Mudtown.”

    She gave him a curious look.

    “There’s a weaponsmith in the Buhru Quarter that works with silver grenades,” he said.

    “We’ll lose at least half a day in port.”

    “If we’re headed into a Harrowing, Thresh will be there,” he said, eyes cold and flat.

    Senna gazed at the deep waters of the river, its current flowing gently toward the sea. Her gut feelings were leading her to Bilgewater, but something didn’t seem quite right.

    “The mist has been reaching out farther with each storm, like it’s searching for something,” she said. “Why return to Bilgewater?”

    “Those islands are his favorite haunts.”

    “This is bigger than Thresh,” she said, more sharply than she intended.

    Lucian didn’t respond. Instead, he opened his canteen, took a long drink of water, and then slowly pushed the stopper back inside.

    “He’s constantly scheming,” he finally said. “And all the other spirits are trapped in their suffering. Who knows what obsessions permeate what’s left of their minds?” He looked away, jaw clenched, lips pressed into a rigid line.

    Senna thought of the chaotic patchwork of maps and lengths of twine that stretched across the walls in their cabin. Lucian had used them to track the Black Mist for years while she was imprisoned in the lantern.

    He can’t see past his hatred.

    Senna shook her head. It was more than just anger. Lucian viewed the mist as a horrific blight upon the world, a scourge of wraiths needing to be purified. But her time in the lantern had shown her a different way. She could use her powers to redeem those wretched souls, liberating them from suffering.

    “The Ruined King is behind these Harrowings. There’s longing there... an intelligence,” she said. “I can feel it. He’s—”

    Something’s wrong!

    A light flashed in the east.

    Lucian opened his mouth to speak, but his words drowned before they reached Senna’s ears. Her legs weakened as an overwhelming weight pressed against her chest. She lunged for the ship’s railing but found Lucian’s hand instead.

    Dark lightning slammed into Senna. The jolt sent her crashing against the deck, every limb contorted in searing pain, her body tensing and twisting as bones threatened to snap. A chorus of screams breached her mind. The anguished cries resounded and swelled until the world shattered in fragments of blinding light. She felt herself being torn away from Lucian and the boat and the shore, and the anchor that held her life in place.

    Sadistic laughter ushered in the silence.



    Ash fell gently on Senna’s face. She cracked open her eyes, flinching as she saw pinpricks of dark lightning crawling down her arms. Tortured screams still resonated in her mind. Slowly, her thoughts cleared, and the arcs of energy dissipated. Only the echo of laughter remained.

    No. No. No... Something’s wrong... You need to get up.

    She struggled to a knee, braced her arm on her leg, and rose in a scattering of ash and cinders. Air, thick and sweltering, rushed past her face like heat from an open furnace, the tang of a burning world on her tongue. She tottered on baked clay—the ship had disappeared, leaving her alone on a plain of sun-cracked mud that stretched across a desolate wasteland, veiled in a haze. A triad of mountains towered in the distance, their fiery crowns spewing smoke into the ruddy sky.

    Senna was back in the lantern.

    Dread rose in her chest, hammering her heart and hitching her breath. She clutched her hands to ease their trembling, and inhaled deeply.

    You’re wrong. This can’t be the lantern.

    But she had seen this before, or something similar: scorched wastelands, frozen tundras, bustling streets in chaotic cities. The landscape perpetually changed and warped in the spectral prison, as varied as its tortures.

    No, this is something else.

    Senna shook away the doubt and squeezed her eyes shut. “Do not deny this truth,” she whispered to herself. “Not again.”

    In the early days of her imprisonment, she had wasted precious months, perhaps years, unable to accept her own death, trapped in a cycle of misery and loneliness. She wouldn’t repeat that mistake. She had escaped once—she would do so again. Her eyes opened, and she looked for a way out.

    A scream sounded from somewhere far away.

    Senna called to the Black Mist, but drew smoke and embers instead. The poor substitutes rushed in, transforming her into a wraith, shrouded by death. She moved, and the world blurred in a smear of color, hues shifting rapidly as the landscape changed.

    She stopped with a jolt, and Bilgewater snapped into place. But it wasn’t the Bilgewater she knew. The harbor lay ruined, overrun by a massive Harrowing. Rotting timber, slime-coated stonework, the bones of decaying leviathans, all melded into twisted spires. The warped amalgamations floated in midair among the broken hulls of ravaged ships and hundreds of charnel coffins once submerged in the sea. A fortune in tithes drifted amid the debris, glittering like ghostly stars.

    Senna released the darkness, and her body returned, the waterlogged planks of the boardwalk creaking beneath her weight. She walked along the causeway and came across the wreckage of a hunting vessel run aground, its copper-tipped prow skewering the remains of a seaside tavern.

    A figure stood at the center of the destruction. It was a statue of a woman, its arms raised in supplication, mottled face frozen in terror. Senna felt a strange familiarity, like a half-remembered dream, and a deluge of sorrow poured over her. Hand quivering, she reached out and lightly brushed the statue’s cheek. The face collapsed, and the entire figure began to break apart. Slowly at first, and then all at once, the stone woman crumbled into a heap of ash.

    He found her!

    An unfamiliar fear swelled inside Senna, urging her to take flight. She pushed it away. Of course he had found her, whoever she was. There was no hiding from Thresh; this was his domain. She had witnessed countless tortures, each soul an endless opportunity for the Chain Warden to delight in their suffering. Senna regarded the pile of ash.

    This isn’t Thresh.

    It didn’t feel quite right. In all her years in the lantern, she had never encountered anything like this. Perhaps he had refined his technique. If there was one constant, it was his pursuit of perfecting misery.

    She looked out at the dark waters of Bilgewater Bay. The fiery mountain range loomed from afar, spanning the horizon. She knew this to be untrue, a construct of the lantern. There were no mountains south of Bilgewater. She would have had to sail around—

    A stray thought flitted through her mind. She reached for it, grabbed it, and turned it over. The vault unlocked, releasing a memory.

    She had been going to Bilgewater—no, they had been going to Bilgewater. Lucian! He would be fighting out there, desperate to free her from the lantern, suffering alone, as he had for years. It had almost broken him.

    Senna’s consciousness reached out across the great expanse. She smiled, feeling Lucian’s love nearby. But there was something else, profound and urgent. It was panic. She had felt it in Lucian only once before—when Thresh had killed her.

    Pushing away her mounting dread, she narrowed her focus and spoke. “Lucian... I’m here.”

    Silence.

    She tried again, and again, and again, every attempt yielding the same result—Lucian remained unmoved by her call. In the past, she had been able to communicate with him from within the lantern, but Thresh must have found a way to suppress her voice.

    Her body trembled in desperation and fury. She shut her eyes, whispering the mantras she’d learned long ago. “Carve away the unwanted. Keep only the stone. Carve away the unwanted. Keep only the stone.”

    She opened her eyes with renewed determination. Thresh hadn’t beaten her yet.

    The rules of nature didn’t apply in the lantern. The ancient relic was an ever-shifting realm crafted for suffering. It appeared infinitely vast, but Senna knew the truth—she had discovered the lantern’s terminus and pressed against its walls, feeling its seams.

    As she studied the sky, her stomach quivered.

    This isn’t the lantern.

    She paused, reflecting again on those early days and the hard facts she had come to accept. She quelled the denials and continued searching. Dark plumes erupted from the fiery peaks, sending black tendrils of soot to mar the sky. She needed to pierce the cinereous veil.

    Drawing smoke and embers into her, she transformed once again, and Bilgewater blurred away as she took to the heavens. Senna flew across the ocean, ascending ever higher. But the mountains rose up as well, rumbling and spewing vapor in her path. She veered to avoid the acrid clouds, but the blazing peaks altered course with her, ever present and unavoidable.

    Darkness spread across the horizon—a great fog threatening to consume all in its path. Unable to evade the shifting billows, she plunged into the gloom. A storm roared around her, the wailing of countless souls pushing against her like a headwind.

    This isn’t the way. You need to turn back.

    Hand outstretched, she pressed even higher. A light flickered beyond her fingertips, and her doubts faded as she sought the edge of the lantern. The light sparked brighter and suddenly snapped at her fingers. She pulled back her hand, but the sting was already flaring into searing pain, stiffening her spectral form. Dark energy surged and leashed her in midair.

    Senna fell from the sky.



    She awoke on hard-packed dirt. Her human form had returned, an aching, knotted cord covered in a dusting of cinders and ash. She rolled onto her back, groaning and wincing as arcs of lightning crackled down her clammy flesh. They dissipated, leaving behind a stinging numbness.

    Physical torture was foreign to the lantern. Thresh rarely resorted to such debased forms of suffering. The mind and soul were richer fields to plant seeds of torment. Perhaps this was her punishment for escaping. And yet, it still felt wrong.

    You need to get up!

    She staggered to a knee, but her leg gave under her weight, and she crumpled back to the ground. The world dimmed as clouds stretched across the sky, pushing away the last remaining color.

    You need to fight... You’re dying!

    Senna laughed at the absurdity of the thought. There were fates worse than death. She had endured them for years—she would bear them again.

    But as the shadows grew, she began to fear what was in store for her this time. Her brief taste of freedom would make her captivity more desolate, her loneliness and torments greater than before.

    And then, she had an even more sinister thought.

    No! Don’t think that!

    Perhaps she had never escaped. What if she had watched Lucian suffer defeat after defeat, and her broken mind had imagined a different outcome, one that lifted her from this pit of misery? Perhaps her escape had been nothing but a delusion.

    As realization flared, Senna wailed, a primal sound filled with rage and despair. No. She hadn’t created this deception—it was made by Thresh.

    It’s not true!

    She shook her head, furious for clinging to false hope.

    You need to get up!

    “No,” she said, clutching her temples.

    You need to fight!

    “No, he’s won. This was his plan.”

    If you stay here, you’ll die!

    “I’m already dead!” she screamed. “I’m just a dead thing that’s cursed!” Her voice broke, along with something inside. She folded over, curling herself up to become small. Her cries of grief echoed through the great expanse.

    It wasn’t meant to be a curse, Senna. What I gave you was a gift.

    Senna bolted upright. The words had been heavy and sharp, piercing her mind like a dagger. They weren’t her own.

    She swayed on her feet, ignoring the numbness in her legs. “Stay out of my head,” she said. “Do you hear me, Thresh?!”

    No laughter. No admission. Nothing.

    The mountains had receded, their fiery peaks muted in gray. Senna stood alone among the falling embers. Energy crackled on her skin, bolts raking down her body.

    “Is that all you have, Chain Warden?” she asked through gritted teeth. “You’ve lost your touch.”

    I’m not the Warden, sweet Senna. But I’ve also known his tortures.

    The voice was melodious and sorrowful and resonated with fragile tenderness. Senna had met others in the lantern, communing with them over their shared loneliness and suffering. Perhaps...

    “Who are you?”

    Silence, and then...

    A friend. Someone who can help you get back to Lucian.

    Bitterness rose in Senna’s throat. “How do you know that name?”

    I know your whole life. I’m here to help, but you’ll need to trust me.

    “You’re here to offer hope?” She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I was wrong. You haven’t lost your touch. It’s more refined.” Senna whirled around, searching for the specter. “Your games are done, Chain Warden,” she said. “The cycle is broken. Here and now. Show yourself!”

    The world unfurled and changed, revealing clear skies over white sands and an emerald sea. Waves lapped at her feet, her ankles, her knees. She cast her gaze inland and gasped. Beyond a ridge of white dunes sat a dense grove, its wide-fronded trees native to her island. Senna was home.

    She heard a soft melody coming from beneath the canopy, evoking memories of her mother singing by the fireside. Senna held her breath, watching as a young girl exited the treeline, humming the long-forgotten hymn.

    She recognized the child—it was her.

    The girl strolled toward the shore, probing dunes with a carved walking stick. A cold swell washed over Senna. This was the fateful morning. The day everything changed. By evening, her innocence would be lost. She took a step toward the girl.

    It’s only a memory, Senna. You can’t change anything.

    “Then why bring me here? Is this another trick?”

    There’s something I need you to see.

    The girl’s eyes brightened. She bent down and plucked a seashell from the sand. Plump fingers caressed the pink husk before placing it in a pocket—one of dozens on her pant legs, each sewn by her mother, in different fabrics and patterns, to hold the countless treasures she found. The girl turned toward Senna and smiled.

    Senna hesitated, then offered a timid wave.

    She can’t see you.

    The girl dashed at Senna, but then at the last moment, she swerved and splashed into the water next to her. Senna whirled, and dread knotted her stomach.

    A shipwreck was washing ashore.

    The girl poked inside a dark hollow in the broken hull with her staff, declaring she had “rights of salvage”. She giggled at the words, convinced their power gave her claim to the ship’s bounty.

    Hands slicked with sweat, Senna grappled with the urge to snatch the girl and run. From her vantage point, she saw the danger the child did not—a tendril of Black Mist stirring in the wreckage.

    “She doesn’t know of the darkness she’s about to unleash on all the people she loves,” she said.

    But Senna’s angle also revealed something she hadn’t seen before. As the mist uncoiled and sought to prey on the child, beneath the water, a glowing sphere approached, its filaments of light breaking the surface, searching. The sphere flitted toward the girl and seeped into her spine. The girl stiffened for a moment, eyes wide with fear and confusion.

    Do you remember what happened next?

    “I-I sensed the danger before I saw it... My mind was screaming... A voice was telling me to run.”

    The girl flung her wooden staff at the dark tendril, and bolted into the woods.

    Senna grew thoughtful, recalling the warning that saved her life. “But it wasn’t my voice. It was yours.”

    The water stirred at Senna’s feet as a trio of luminous filaments rose from the sea. They turned and twisted, knitting together into a brilliant silhouette of hallowed light that gradually formed into the spirit of a young woman. The radiance washed away the details of her face, leaving only an impression of kindness and love. A rush of sorrow and joy overwhelmed Senna, like waters from a broken levee.

    “The attack wasn’t your fault,” said the spirit. She spoke with her true voice and not through Senna’s mind. “You were alive. And that’s the one thing the Black Mist cannot abide, for it abhors all life.”

    The words lifted a weight Senna had carried all her life. Unburdened, she was able to see the moment in a different way. “I should’ve died on that beach. I’d be another wraith, screaming in the mist, if you hadn’t warned me.” She paused to consider. “Why did you help me?”

    The spirit’s thoughts seemed to go far away, and although her face remained hazy behind the hallowed light, Senna saw the hint of a smile on her lips. “I was a girl once, playing with dolls, singing as I made believe.” She fixed her gaze on Senna. “Life should be preserved.”

    “But you stayed afterward,” Senna said, her voice shaking. “All these years, the Black Mist wasn’t drawn to me—it was you. The unnatural life. You’re the curse.”

    “If I could have spared you that pain... ripped myself out... I would have. I tried for years, but I didn’t know how.” The spirit turned and looked down at the water. “And then... to watch you grow, from that frightened girl into this fierce woman, a Sentinel of Light fighting back the mist—I had to see it through.”

    Senna arranged the pieces. That first night. Her village. Her home. All those loves swept away in dark waves. The chasm between her and those who survived. The fear in their eyes. Years spent running in terror. Losing people who tried to protect her. Losing Urias, her mentor. The walls she’d built to guard against the horror and the guilt, believing she had brought the curse upon herself.

    “I was a little girl—if I had known the truth...”

    “It was best that I didn’t interfere,” the spirit said, wringing her ghostly hands. “To learn you were conjoined to some unwelcome passenger, it would have robbed you of your own heart.”

    “But you did interfere,” Senna shot back. “The itch down my spine. The wrench of my gut. Even the whispers in my mind. It’s always been you!”

    The spirit hung her head in shame. “I was only helping you... when it was necessary.”

    “Help? Is that what that was? All these years, you let me suffer alone!” Senna hardened, venom lacing her voice. “Why reveal yourself now?”

    The spirit met Senna’s glare, her eyes tender but resolute. “You were never alone, Senna. I just couldn’t reach you through the veil, until now.”

    The world shifted once again, as the white sands and emerald sea were blown away by a sulfurous wind. The pair remained on the island, but now the waters raged, and the mountains towered much closer than before. Ash rained down.

    Senna thought about these new revelations, as well as the discoveries she had made in the lantern, secrets learned from other fallen Sentinels. This spirit’s presence had marked her, leading her down a path to death and captivity. But that unnatural life had also kept her alive in the lantern, empowering her to escape. And now, it was still helping her. She knew in her bones that her life was tied to this spirit.

    Senna had many questions and lingering resentment, but she let them burn away like dying embers. Escape was the only thing that mattered.

    “You’ve been warning me that this isn’t the lantern,” she said, watching the waves crash against the shore. “This is all in my mind, isn’t it?”

    “Yes. But the threat is very real. It was Thresh’s powers that struck you down,” said the spirit. “His reach extends across the world, but Bilgewater is his goal for now.”

    “Then he’s the key. Lucian was right.”

    “The Warden is of consequence. But his cruelty only helped set things into motion... for him,” she said, motioning toward the horizon. Senna followed the spirit’s gesture to the mountain peaks. They rumbled across the ocean, pouring out thick gouts of darkness. “You’ve seen him in catacombs, and temples, and distant shores.” The spirit smiled wanly. “Trust your instincts.”

    “What does he want?”

    “To possess what is no longer his,” she said, the softness gone from her voice, the hallowed light flaring with her words. “He’s a child with a bitter heart, who would rather make the world share his misery than face it alone.”

    “How do we stop him?”

    “You’re the best hope. The years of training, the powers you wield, even your time in the lantern, all helped you become a formidable weapon.” The spirit looked away, eyes pooling with remorse. “I’ll be with you, every step of the way... Yet I fear, in the end, it may take all we have.”

    Senna simply nodded. “I’ve lived. I’ve fought. I’ve died. And still, I feel the warmth of Lucian’s arms, even now,” she said. “This curse is a gift.” She had come to accept it, even if Lucian had not. Squaring her shoulders, she turned her attention back to the mission. “Can we make it to Bilgewater in time?”

    The spirit seemed to ponder the question. “The attack is already under—”

    Before she could finish, the spirit’s form tensed with fear.

    Arcs of dark light spiked through Senna, driving her to one knee. She gasped for air as color drained from the sky. The heavens pressed in, and the world collapsed into a cavern of swirling ashfall. Every blistering jolt narrowed the cave even more—eventually it would become her tomb.

    Senna twisted, fighting the contortions of her body, and looked to the spirit. The apparition was folded over, writhing, trembling, sharing in the misery. Lightning pulsed across her ghostly form, searing away her hallowed light.

    “What... is... this?” Senna wheezed.

    “Thresh... His attack is still destroying your body... You must drive out his power.”

    Senna focused on the dark energy, bound it with her own light, and pushed it away as she would the Black Mist. It flowed out in a steady stream. But as it reached the tipping point, the power resisted and rushed back in, dousing her in pain. She crumpled to the ground.

    Her strength was rapidly fading, but underneath her dwindling light, she felt an untapped reserve of radiant power. It belonged to the spirit.

    “You say I’m never alone? Then prove it!” Senna grabbed the woman’s spectral hand. “Channel your light and add it to my own.”

    She turned toward Senna, though it looked painful to do so. “I’ve never—”

    “Don’t worry, I’ll help you,” she said, forcing a smile through the agony.

    Together, they channeled their light and pushed against the dark energy. They met resistance, but only for a moment, and then the nightmare exploded in a blinding flash of white.



    Senna woke with a gasp. She sat up, dark lightning still erupting from her chest. It dissipated in the cool morning air, and she collapsed in Lucian’s arms.

    “No, Senna... Not again, please...” Lucian’s voice quavered, his body shuddering as he held fast.

    “It’s—it’s passed... I’m okay.” She waited for a moment, feeling his heartbeat gradually slow, his trembling subside. Then she gently pulled away.

    “What is that?” Lucian asked, confusion and fear in his eyes.

    A faint light glowed in her chest. Senna remained perfectly still, until the light faded away. She waited, listening, feeling, hoping for the slightest hint. “Are you still there?” she finally asked, her voice tremulous.

    “Yes,” said Lucian and the spirit, in her mind and in her ear.

    Senna exhaled and smiled.

    Lucian was staring at her, nodding, searching for answers. She met his gaze, and said, “We need to get to Bilgewater—something terrible has happened.”

    He was about to speak, to rattle off a litany of questions, but she reached for his hand. “I’ll explain what I can, but we need to leave, now.”

    Lucian sighed, a heavy and reluctant sound, but he helped her to her feet and prepared to launch. The ship gently creaked and swayed on the river, tugging against its anchor, ready to set sail. Senna looked toward the east, breathing in the new day, sunlight shimmering off the water.

    For the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel alone.

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