LoL Universe Indexing and Search

My yordle Norra snores into the pages of my friend, Book. My tail twitches as dozens of moon-moths sail in through the open window like floating lanterns, and I leap joyfully into the air, not caring if I catch one. I bounce higher and higher, batting at the moon-moths as they drift all around me.

One of them bends and turns inside itself, lashing about until it twists into the shape of a mackerel. Around me, the other moon-moths spin in mid-air, all transforming into floating fish. Delicious—until the whole world turns upside down. Books cascade up from the shelves, landing on the ceiling with a dozen thuds. My Norra floats upward, still asleep. The fish flounder in every direction as we all fall up, up, up—

I wake up, blinking sleepily in a wooden box as moonlight shines through the slats. How in a mouse’s house did I get here? Oh yes. The tasty stink of fish fills my nose and I remember prowling the streets of Bilgewater, finding a crate of dried fish, then eating my fill before falling into a deep, belly-full sleep.

Before I can get comfy again, my stomach lurches and I’m knocked onto my side. Dozens of dried fish fall on top of me—just like my dream!—and my stomach purrs.

Book flutters in the corner as it tries to edge away from the falling fish. It’s always hinting that food is bad for its pages. I think dried-up-trees would be much improved with the smell of fish, but Book knows much more about dried-up-trees than I do, so I don’t argue.

I peek through the cracks between the slats. The floor beneath us creaks and shifts while, in the distance, moonlight flickers on the surface of the… ocean!

“Book, whyyy?!” I cry. “Naps never lead to bad things!”

Book opens and closes in exasperation. I don’t do water, and neither does Book.

I start to panic. Book rustles, reminding me not to worry—but it’s too late. I scratch and scramble at the wood in desperation, and I shred some of the dried fish by accident. This ocean is making me destroy my yummiest snack—it’s the worst type of water! I paw at Book’s cover, opening it to a frost-tinged portal that will take us far away from this watery nightmare. We have to escape somewhere, anywhere. Even somewhere cold.

I’m about to jump into Book’s portal when I hear a scream that sounds like tinkling bells and the brightest rainbows. A scream that makes my fur stand on end. A yordle scream.

I peek through the slats in the crate and watch as two human sailors drag a blue-furred yordle to the edge of the bustling ship’s deck. One of them has black chin-whiskers and the other is chubby, and both are smirking. They step over roped stacks of harpoons, fishing poles, spears, and coils of thick fishing wire. Must be deep-sea monster hunters.

“This little ’un is gonna fetch us a prize gulperfish, eh?” the first sailor says.

“I hear the biggest fish love yordle meat,” says the chubbier sailor. “Never tried it before, myself. Not a lot of yordles ’round Bilgewater.”

The blue-furred yordle squeals and struggles against them. “I’m not bait!” he exclaims, squeaking with each word. “I beg you, please release me!” The sailors don’t budge.

The whole ship tilts as a particularly large bump shakes my crate. “Ah, that’ll be the fish now. Time to fill our boat with gulperflesh!” says the first sailor, grinning. I don’t like his grin.

An enormous fin circles our boat, making lion-sized waves that bash the side of our ship. I feel Book tugging at me. I know it wants us to escape through a portal, to get away from the bad water right now before anyone sees us, but I hear the yordle cry out. I stick my paw through the slats in the crate and open the crate’s latch. I won’t leave a yordle alone to die. Not after losing my Norra.

The sailors watch the fin thrash around in the water. They don’t notice me as I leap from my crate like the quietest tiger and stalk them from behind.

The poor yordle is tied to a long fishing pole, which the sailors are dangling over the ocean. The water beneath him is bubbling and frothing. How does water always move in the worst ways?! I jump over the pile of harpoons and Book follows, flying next to me and nervously flapping its pages as it hovers in the air. They see us.

“Is that a purple raccoon—with a flying book?” one of the sailors asks.

“I think it’s a baby bear with a journal,” says another.

“No, you idiots, it’s just a cat,” says a third. “Get it!”

The sailors rush at me, but I dart swiftly between their feet. I unfurl a coil of magic that twists and tangles around their legs. They trip and topple like cups on a table.

I perch on the ship’s railing next to the fishing pole, unsure what to do next. The waves swirl below us, and my hunting instincts kick in—something’s gonna pounce.

“Untie me!” shouts the yordle as he clings to the fishing rod. “I am not a piece of bait. This is quite strange and embarrassing!”

Luckily for him, I am not afraid of fish. Even if I don’t like water.

I bound onto the fishing pole. In the midst of a cat’s leap, sometimes time slows. With my paws splayed out like pancakes and wind rushing through my fur over the terrible water, I am determined to save this yordle with everything I’ve got. Besides, mid-leap, there’s no going back.

“Don’t worry, small blue yordle!” I shout. “I got you!”

The yordle’s fate and mine intertwine as I land on its shoulder, with Book right behind.

The fishing pole wobbles under our weight. The biggest fish I’ve ever seen—a third the size of the boat—bursts from the sea with its mouth gaping open, hundreds of teeth glistening in the moonlight. Its jaws open so wide it could swallow a pair of cows, without even chewing them up. Even in the dark, with my shinylight I can see its skin is made up of pointed razor-sharp scales of silver and violet.

The giant gulperfish swallows us whole—the yordle, Book, me, and even a bit of the fishing pole, with room to spare.

We jostle against the roof of the fish’s mouth as it falls back into the water. It’s pitch-black, and smells like old seafood! Before it can gulp us down, though, I balloon open a magical shield that bubbles around us, lodging us in the fish’s leathery gullet. I blink on my shinylight again, illuminating some seriously rotten teeth that explain the awful smell. The yordle squeals at the sight. The fish lashes about, and the three of us are thrown in every direction, protected by the impermeable bubble.

What a strange way to make new friends!

I try to open Book so the three of us can escape, but the gulperfish leaps into the air once more, and we are tossed into a heap inside the bubble. We fall with a thud—the fish must have landed on the ship’s deck. I hear the sailors shouting as the enormous gulper thrashes back and forth, slapping them with its tail.

I hear a splash, and another, and another. The humans must have been knocked into the water. Still stuck in the throat of the gulperfish, I flip Book open to a portal that shimmers with the dusky green of Bandle City, the green of home.

I grab the small yordle’s shirt with my teeth and dive into the page. The portal widens and we spin into the spirit realm, dizzy and whirling into a jumble of colors.

We emerge, coughing, on the banks of a shallow creek. My lungs fill with the sweet air of Bandle City, thick and lush as in my dream. Sapphire-blue crickets chirp in the twilight as the brook babbles gently, full of fish—normal-sized fish.

Book flaps its pages to dry off. The blue-furred yordle stands up, dripping and shaking. “What was that? How did we… escape?” he asks. “Wasn’t the nearest Bilgewater portal back on the docks?”

“Lucky for us, Book carries our portals around wherever we go,” I say. Book twirls, showing off its dried-up-tree pages, each inscribed with a magical gateway outlined in ink and paint.

“Well, thank you for saving me, both of you,” says the yordle. He looks at Book curiously. “Is this where you’re from, too?”

“Yes, but we don’t live here anymore,” I say. I look at Book, sadly, thinking of master.

Book flutters. I know it thinks it’s time to move on.

“You know how to get home from here?” I ask the yordle.

“Yes, yes, just up the hill past the bowl-moles. I know this meadow well. And I do hope you find your yordle,” he says, before wandering off.

I stay for a moment, watching as the gloaming turns to daybreak. I catch a glimpse of a moon-moth hovering on the horizon and I long to pounce on it, but I remember that Norra is still lost somewhere, perhaps waiting for us to rescue her this very minute.

I pat Book as gently as I can with my paw—I know it misses her too.

Then I open it to a new page, and dive in.

It was the stench of Bloodharbor that hit you first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How so?” asked Sarah.

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

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

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

“You worry too much, Rafen.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Your bones talking to you again?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like Sarah Fortune, Bilgewater was a survivor.

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

“Ship ahoy,” said Rafen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now you’re just being cruel.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They, of course, all knew her.

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

“Quite the gathering, eh?” said Rafen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So I heard.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rafen saw him too and gripped her arm.

“Remember the Truce,” he hissed urgently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cannonball dent in the right side.

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

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

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

Captain Petyr Harker.

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

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

Her pistol balls.

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

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

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

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

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

Rafen appeared on her left, dragging her off Petyr.

“Easy, captain,” he said. “Easy now…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Why are you here, Petyr?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“Looks expensive.”

“It was.”

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

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

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

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

“And how’s that working out for you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t know you knew Aligh.”

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

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

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

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

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

Rafen duly poured her a measure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Moon Serpent sailed onward, deeper into the fog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll drink to that,” said Petyr.

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

Where in the eight seas is Rafen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah looked back down the cannon barrel.

And then she knew.

“Oh no…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aligh, you treacherous bastard!” she yelled.

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

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

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

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

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

She knew she wouldn’t make it.

The silver flame lit the oiled touchpaper.

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

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

Her second was that the Moon Serpent was still afloat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not everyone was dead.

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

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

Rafen! Where’s Rafen?

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

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

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

Petyr Harker.

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

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

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

You’re alive, damn it! Do something!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah risked a glance behind her.

Cannonball dent in the right side…

This was her chance to even those odds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, no, no…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You killed them!” he cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s out there…?

And then she saw it.

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

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

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

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

This is impossible.

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

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

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

Even his name was said to be a curse.

“Nautilus…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aligh pulled his way along the cannon toward her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let them all drown.

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

In moments, nothing would remain on the surface.

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

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

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

She couldn’t shake him loose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right indeed,” said Rafen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’d never believe me,” said Sarah.

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

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

“Fair enough.”

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

“Aligh’s sigil,” said Rafen.

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

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

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

A hunched wretch in an expensive kraken-skin coat.

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

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

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

“Truth Bearer, this is why we must retreat to Buhru. We cannot save the paylangi,” the Hierophant said. The heavy-set woman grinned, obviously pleased by the prospect of leaving Bilgewater.

“You’ve mentioned that before,” Illaoi said, walking around the stone table in the center of the room. She rolled her shoulders, loosening the muscles to fight off a yawn.

Beside the Hierophant, an elderly serpent caller stood. He wore a vestment made from ropes. Each indigo-dyed cord had been woven to curl; their varying thicknesses and faded kraken ink gave him the illusion of being draped in rough-hewn tentacles. His face was completely covered by a black tattoo depicting the endless teeth of a leviathan’s maw. Monks and serpent callers were always trying to look scary. It was an annoying habit of most men.

“The greatest beasts won’t approach Bilgewater,” the serpent caller said with a wheeze. “They stay out in the deep water, away from the stench of the Slaughter Docks. At best, a few half-starved younglings will heed our summons.”

Only the greatest children of Nagakabouros were strong enough to consume the mists and defend the city from the Harrowing. The rest of the Serpent Isles didn’t have this problem.

It was yet another reminder of the ignorance of Bilgewater’s population. The mainlanders and their descendants didn’t give time for fresh water to flow through and clean their docks. Instead, the paylangi settled permanent anchorages around every shore in the bay. It was so foolish. Many of the priesthood asserted it was proof the paylangi actually wanted to be consumed by the Black Mists.

“Crap,” Illaoi said. If she was going to stay, she would have to find a way to defend the city without serpents. She picked at the food from one of the offering bowls around her, before selecting a mango. She needed a plan, and these two fools were useless.

A loud crack interrupted her musing. A heavy, wooden door had slammed open downstairs.

Gangplank’s voice howled, the words were unintelligible, echoing around the stone walls.

“We pulled him from the water, as you commanded,” the Hierophant smiled, adjusting the jade collar of her office. “Perhaps it would have been better to let his energy return to Nagakabouros?”

“You do not judge souls.”

“Of course Truth Bearer, it is for Nagakabouros to judge,” he said, implying that Illaoi’s opinion was biased.

Illaoi walked between the two clerics, dwarfing the pair of them. Even for an islander, the Truth Bearer was tall. It had always been so. She was taller even than the largest Northman. As a girl, she had been self-conscious about it, always feeling like she was stumbling into people, but she had learned. When I move, they should know enough to get out of my way.

She lifted the Eye of God from its stand. The golden idol was larger than a wine barrel and many times the weight. Her fingers tingled against its cold metal. It had been placed next to the giant roaring fire, which illuminated the room, but the Eye of God stayed forever cool and damp to the touch. Illaoi deftly shouldered its massive weight. In a dozen years, the Truth Bearer had never been more than two strides from it.

“Hierophant, I remember my duties,” Illaoi said as she headed down the stairs. “We will not be retreating to Buhru. I will stop the Harrowing here.”

The high priestess had done little but complain since arriving from Buhru, but there was some truth in her words.

When Gangplank’s ship had exploded, Illaoi’s heart had jumped. It had been many years since they had laid together, many years since she had ended the relationship... but some feelings still lingered. She had loved him once… stupid, old bastard.

Surrounded by tall walls of interlocking stones, the courtyard to the temple was shaped like the fanged mouth of a leviathan. The entrance looked over the blue waters of the bay far below. Illaoi stomped down the stairway toward the front gate. She assumed she would have to smack Gangplank in the mouth; he was prone to arrogance and rum. But still, it would be nice to see him.

She was unprepared for the snarling creature in her temple’s entrance. She knew he had been injured, but not like this. He was limping badly and bent over from shattered ribs. He cradled what was left of his arm.

He swung a pistol around the room with his other arm, in a half-mad attempt to force the monks and priestesses to back away from him; oblivious to the fact that these were the very people who had pulled his drowned body from the bay only a few hours ago. Worse, his pistol was clearly empty and completely useless.

“Where is Illaoi?” he bellowed.

“I’m here, Gangplank,” she answered. “You look like crap.”

He fell to his knees.

“It was Miss Fortune. Had to be. Working with those two alley whores. They sank it.”

“I do not care about your warship,” she said.

“You were always telling me to move on, to head back out to sea. I needed a boat.”

“You need only a canoe for the sea.”

“This is my town!” he screamed.

The monks and priestesses surrounding Gangplank tensed at this outburst. That Gangplank was foolish enough to make such a claim while standing in a structure thousands of years older than his city, was dangerous in itself. But a paylangi shouting at the thrice-blessed Truth Bearer in her own temple? Any other man would’ve been dumped into the sea with broken knees.

“It’s my town!” he roared again. Spittle flew from his mouth in rage.

“So what are you gonna do about it?” Illaoi said.

“I, I need Okao and the other chiefs’ support. They’ll listen to you... if you ask them. If you ask them, they’ll help me.” He lowered his head in front of her.

“What are you going to do about it?” Illaoi said, raising her voice this time.

“What can I do?” he said hopelessly. “She took my ship, she took my men, she took my arm. Anything I had left… I used to get here.”

“Leave us,” Illaoi told the other priests as she walked toward the gate. She looked down on Gangplank. It had been ten years since she’d last seen him; drink and worry had taken his dashing looks.

“There is nothing for me but this town, and without your help…” his voice trailed off when he met her gaze. Illaoi kept her eyes as hard and unforgiving as the Kraken. She gave Gangplank nothing. The priestess of Nagakabouros could show no pity or sympathy, even if it tore at her chest. In despair, the old captain’s eyes darted away from hers.

“I could do that,” Illaoi said, “and with a word, the tribes and Okao’s gang would join you. But why should I?”

“Help me, damn it! You owe me,” he snapped like a child.

“I owe you?” Illaoi rolled the words in her mouth.

“I keep up the rituals. I offer the sacrifices,” Gangplank snarled.

“But clearly you did not learn the lesson. Rituals? Sacrifices? You speak of things for weak men and their weak gods. My god demands action,” Illaoi said.

“I suffered for this town! Bled for it. It is mine by right!”

Illaoi knew what she had to do. She knew it before Gangplank had spoken. She had known years before his ship had sunk.

Gangplank had strayed. For too long, he had festered in the hatred and self-pity his father had beaten into him. Illaoi had ignored her duty. She had ignored it because she had loved him, once, and because she had led him down this path when she left him. He had been content as a killer, a corsair, a true pirate, and never interested in his father’s title of Reaver King.

He had only set anchor in his bloody quest to become the lord of Bilgewater after they had parted ways.

Illaoi felt a dampness in her eyes. His time had passed. He had been unable to move forward. To advance. To evolve. And now? Now he would not survive the Test of Nagakabouros. But he needed to be tested. He was here to be tested.

Illaoi looked at the old pirate before her. Could I send him away? Trust that he still has some sliver of strength or ambition that might see him through? If I send him away, he might live, at least…

That was not the way of Nagakabouros. That was not the role of a Truth Bearer. This was not the place for doubts or second-guessing. If she trusted her god, she must trust her instincts. If she felt he had to be tested, then it was her god’s will. And what fool would choose a man over a god?

Gripping the Eye of God’s handle tightly, Illaoi lowered the heavy gold icon from her shoulder. A familiar lightness replaced it, yet somehow she could still feel its weight there.

“Please,” Gangplank begged. “Show me some kindness, at least.”

“I will show you the truth,” Illaoi said, steeling her will.

She stomp-kicked Gangplank, her heel smashing into his nose with a crunch. He flew backward like a drunkard, blood pouring down his lip. He rolled over and looked up at her with furious eyes.

“BEHOLD!” Illaoi intoned.

She reached out with her mind and called forth the energy of the Mother Serpent as she swung the giant idol forward. A glowing mist vomited from the icon’s mouth and swirls of blue-green energy formed around the Mother Serpent’s face, solidifying into ghostly tentacles. Touched by gold, these tendrils were as beautiful as the sunrise over water, and as horrifying as the darkest undersea abomination. More tentacles grew from the icon, replicating around the room as if born from some unknowable mathematics. Exponentially they grew larger, and somehow each one’s growth seemed to hold all the promise and horror of the world.

“No!” Gangplank screamed. But the whirlwind ignored his cries as the storm of tentacles took him.

“Face Nagakabouros!” she yelled. “Prove yourself!” The tentacles grasped at Gangplank, then dived into his chest. He shuddered as ghostly images of his past lives shook around him.

He screamed as his soul was ripped from his body. His doppelganger stood unmoving before Illaoi. The spirit of Gangplank smoldered an almost blinding blue, its body crackling and flickering through his previous lives.

The mass of tentacles attacked the wounded captain. Gangplank rolled and stumbled to his feet, dodging what he could. But for each one that missed, more and more appeared. Reality twisted and churned around him. The swarm of tentacles crashed against him, pushing him down, pulling him further and further from his soul—toward oblivion.

Illaoi wanted to look away. More than anything, she wanted to turn her eyes. It is my duty to witness his passing. He was a great man, but he has failed. The universe demands—

Gangplank rose. Slowly, inexorably, and unrelentingly he forced his broken body to stand. He ripped himself from the mass of tentacles and advanced step by painstaking step, roaring through the agony. Bloody and exhausted, he finally stood in front of Illaoi. His eyes bulged with hate and pain, but full of purpose. With his final ounce of strength, he walked into the glowing visage of his spirit.

“I will be king.”

The wind fell still. The tentacles ruptured in bursts of light. Nagakabouros was satisfied.

“You are in motion,” Illaoi smiled.

Gangplank stood inches from his former love—glaring at her. His back arched and his chest swelled with the sweet air of resolve—he was the proud captain once more.

Gangplank turned and walked away from her, no less injured or limping, but his stride now held its familiar boldness.

“Next time I ask for help, just say no,” Gangplank growled.

“Do something about that arm,” Illaoi said.

“Was nice to see you,” he said as he walked out of the temple and down the long steps toward the water below.

“Stupid old bastard,” she grinned.

As the monks and hierophant returned to the antechamber, Illaoi remembered there were a thousand things she needed to do. A thousand little burdens she needed to carry. The Truth Bearer would have to meet with Sarah Fortune. Illaoi suspected Nagakabouros would soon need to test the bounty hunter.

“Tell Okao and the chiefs to support Gangplank,” Illaoi said to the hierophant. “Help him retake the city.”

“The city is in chaos, many want his head. He won’t survive the night,” the hierophant grumbled, looking at the injured captain struggling down the steps.

“He is still the right man for the job,” Illaoi said as she hefted the Eye of God onto her shoulder.

We can never be certain if we’re doing the right thing, or how things will happen, or when we will die. But the universe gives us our desires, and our instincts. So we must trust them.

She began walking up the steps from the courtyard to the inner temple, the Truth Bearer’s idol on her shoulder. It was a heavy burden—but Illaoi didn’t mind it.

She didn’t mind at all.

Illaoi’s powerful physique is dwarfed only by her indomitable faith. As the prophet of the Great Kraken, she uses a huge, golden idol to rip her foes’ spirits from their bodies and shatter their perception of reality. All who challenge the “Truth Bearer of Nagakabouros” soon discover Illaoi never battles alone - the god of the Serpent Isles fights by her side.

All who encounter Illaoi are struck by her presence. An intense woman, the priestess is fully committed to the experience of living. She takes what she wants, destroys what she hates, and revels in everything she loves.

However, to truly know Illaoi you must understand the religion she has devoted her life to. Nagakabouros, the deity of her faith, is usually depicted as an enormous serpent head with tentacles spiraling around it in endless motion, with no beginning and no end. Also called The Mother Serpent, The Great Kraken, or even The Bearded Lady, Nagakabouros is the Serpent Isles’ god of life, ocean storms, and motion. (The literal translation of its name is “the unending monster that drives the sea and sky.”) Central to the religion’s theology are three tenets: every spirit was born to serve the universe; desire was built into every living being by the universe; the universe only moves toward its destiny when living creatures chase their desires.

Lesser priestesses are tasked with maintaining temples, calling holy serpents, and teaching people the ways of Nagakabouros. As the religion’s Truth Bearer, Illaoi’s role is to serve the god directly by unblocking the flow of the universe. To this end, she has two sacred responsibilities.

The first duty of a Truth Bearer is to be the spearhead in the war against undeath. Having fallen outside of the normal flow of the universe, the undead are considered an abomination against Nagakabouros. While it is the responsibility of every priestess of the Kraken to protect the indigenous population from the Harrowing, a Truth Bearer directly engages its most powerful spirits and drives the Black Mist back.

Second, Illaoi is tasked with seeking out individuals of great potential and challenging them with the Test of Nagakabouros. This task is the burden Illaoi’s title reflects. With her massive, holy relic, The Eye of God, the Truth Bearer strips the subject’s spirit from their body then forces them to stand against her to prove their worth. She does this knowing those who fail will be completely annihilated, for the great Kraken has no tolerance for cowardice, doubt, or restraint. But destruction is never the goal. Survivors of the ordeal are forever changed and often find the will to pursue their true destiny.

Though Illaoi is the most powerful and respected Truth Bearer in a hundred generations, it is where she has broken the traditions of her faith that speaks the most about her. Having completed her training as a Truth Bearer, and at the height of her power, Illaoi left the golden temples of Buhru for the squalor of nearby Bilgewater.

The pirate city is the only place foreigners are permitted on the Serpent Isles, viewed as a fetid gutter by Illaoi’s people. Previous Truth Bearers ignored the city and viewed the arriving foreigners as little better than untouchables. Illaoi broke with tradition when she chose to protect residents of Bilgewater from the Harrowing, or even more controversially when she decided that some of its residents had souls worthy of the great test. Despite this, only a handful of temples have been opened in the city, and very few paylangi (islander slang for residents of mainlander descent) have ever been permitted inside. Regardless, it is Illaoi who has brought the widespread awareness of the Mother Serpent to Bilgewater, and it is her indomitable spirit that has brought her religion into favor there.

Rumors persist that Bilgewater’s most bloodthirsty and infamous pirate had his heart broken by the towering priestess. To anyone who has ever met her, this is no surprise. Illaoi’s rough manner belies subtle intelligence, strength, and a magnetic confidence.

Many seek Illaoi’s favor and welcome her to Bilgewater... yet everyone fears being tested by the Kraken’s Prophet.

“There can be no rest. We are the motion.”

—From The Twenty Wisdoms of Nagakabouros

The last survivor of a long-forgotten religious order, Yorick is both blessed and cursed with power over the dead. Trapped on the Shadow Isles, his only companions are the rotting corpses and shrieking spirits that he gathers to him. Yorick’s monstrous actions belie his noble purpose: to free his home from the curse of the Ruination.

Even as a child, Yorick’s life was never normal. Raised in a fishing village at the very edge of the Blessed Isles, he always struggled to find acceptance. While most children his age were playing hide-and-seek, young Yorick was making friends of a different kind—the spirits of the recently deceased.

At first, Yorick was terrified of his ability to see and hear the dead. Whenever someone in the village passed away, Yorick would lie awake all night, waiting for the chilling cry of a new visitor. He could not understand why they chose to haunt him, and why his parents believed the spirits to be nothing more than nightmares.

In time, he came to realize the souls were not there to harm him. They were simply lost and needed help finding their way to the beyond. Since only Yorick was able to see these spirits, he took it upon himself to be their guide, escorting them to whatever awaited in eternity.

The task was bittersweet. Yorick found that he enjoyed the company of ghosts, but each one he brought to rest meant saying farewell to another friend. To the dead, he was a savior, but to the living, he was a pariah. The villagers only saw a disturbed little boy who spoke to people who weren’t there.

Tales of Yorick’s visions soon spread beyond his village, and drew the attention of a small order of monks who dwelled at the heart of the Blessed Isles. Its envoys traveled to Yorick’s island, believing he could become an asset to their faith.

Yorick agreed to journey to their monastery, and there, he learned the ways of the Brethren of the Dusk and the true significance of their trappings. Every monk carried a spade as a symbol of their duty to conduct proper burial rites, which ensured souls would not lose their way. And each brother wore a vial of water drawn from the Blessed Isles’ sacred spring. These Tears of Life represented the monks’ duty to heal the living.

Yet, no matter how he tried, Yorick could never gain the acceptance of the other monks. To them, he was tangible proof of things that should only be known through faith. They resented his power to easily perceive what they themselves had struggled their entire lives to understand. Shunned by his brothers, Yorick found himself alone again.

One morning, as he tended to his duties in the cemetery, Yorick was interrupted by the sight of a pitch-black cloud roiling across the surface of the Blessed Isles, devouring everything in its path. Yorick tried to run, but the cloud quickly enveloped him and plunged him into shadow.

All around Yorick, living things began to writhe and contort, corrupted by the foul magic in the Black Mist. People, animals, even plants began to transform into vile, ghoulish mockeries of their former selves. Whispers emanated from the turbulent air around him, and his brothers began ripping the vials of healing water from their necks, as if the objects were causing them great anguish. A moment later, Yorick watched in abject horror as the monks’ souls were ripped from their bodies, leaving cold, pale corpses behind.

Among the quieting screams of his brethren, Yorick alone could hear voices within the mist.

“Remove it. Join us. We will become one.”

He felt his fingers grasping for the vial at his neck. Mustering all his resolve, Yorick forced his hands away from his throat and commanded the howling souls to stop. The Black Mist writhed violently, and darkness overtook him.

When Yorick awoke, the winds had calmed, and the once-fertile lands had transformed into the grotesque hellscape of the Shadow Isles. Isolated tendrils of the Black Mist clung to him, trying to overtake the one living thing not yet corrupted. As the Mist wrapped itself around him, Yorick saw it suddenly recoil from the vial at his neck. Yorick clutched the blessed water, realizing it was all that kept him alive.

In the days that followed, Yorick scoured the islands for survivors, but found only the twisted remnants of what once lived there. Everywhere he walked, he witnessed wretched spirits rising from the bodies of the dead.

As he searched, Yorick slowly pieced together the events that led to the cataclysm: A king had arrived seeking to resurrect his queen, but instead, had doomed the Isles and everything on them.

Yorick wished to find this “Ruined King” and undo the curse he had unleashed. But he felt powerless in the face of the seemingly endless death that surrounded him.

Almost lost within his grief, Yorick began to speak to the spirits around him, attempting to find solace with them as he had as a child. Instead, as he communed with the Mist, corpses left their graves, guided by his voice. He realized the bodies he once laid to rest were now his to command.

A glimmer of hope shone from the heart of his despair. To free the dead of the Shadow Isles, Yorick would wield their power and their strength.

In order to end the curse, he would be forced to use it.

“Help… me,” begged the shipwrecked man.

Yorick couldn’t say how long the survivor had been lying there, bones broken, bleeding into what remained of his wrecked sailing vessel. He had been moaning loudly, but his cries were drowned out by the multitude of wailing souls that haunted the isle. A maelstrom of spirits gathered around him, drawn to his flickering life force like a beacon, hungry to reap a fresh soul. The man’s eyes widened in horror.

He was right to be scared. Yorick had seen what happened to lost spirits taken by the Black Mist, and this—this was warm flesh, a rarity in the Shadow Isles. It had been how long—a hundred years?—since Yorick had seen a living being? He could feel the Mist on his back quivering, eager to wrap this stranger in its cold embrace. But the sight of the man stirred something in Yorick he had long forgotten, and whatever it was would not allow him to surrender this life. The burly monk heaved the damaged man onto his shoulders and carried him back up the hill to his old monastery.

Yorick studied the face of the injured man as he groaned in agonized protest with each step the monk took. Why did you come here, live one?

After completing the climb, Yorick carried his guest through several corridors in the abbey, before coming to a stop in an old infirmary. He eased the shipwrecked man onto a massive stone table and began to check his vitals. Most of the man’s ribs were shattered, and one of his lungs had collapsed.

“Why do you waste your time?” asked a chorus of voices, speaking in unison from the Mist on Yorick’s back.

Yorick remained silent. He left the table and made his way to a heavy door in the rear of the infirmary. The door resisted as he pushed, his hand doing little but leaving a print in the thick layer of dust. He pressed his shoulder against the wood and heaved his entire weight into it.

“So much effort for naught,” sneered the Mist. “Let us have him.”

Again, Yorick answered it with contemptuous silence as he finally forced the door open. The heavy oak dragged across the stone tiles of the monastery floor, revealing a chamber full of scrolls, herbs, and poultices. For a moment, Yorick stared at the artifacts of his former life, struggling to remember how to use them. He picked up a few that looked familiar—bandages, yellow and brittle with age, and some ointment that had long turned to crust—and returned to the man atop the stone table.

“Just leave him,” said the Mist. “He was ours the moment he came ashore.”

“Quiet!” snapped Yorick.

The man on the table was now gasping for breath. Knowing he had little time to save him, Yorick tried to bind his wounds, but the rotten bandages fell apart as quickly as he could apply them.

As his breath grew more ragged, the man convulsed. He grabbed the monk’s arm in agonized desperation. Yorick knew there was only one thing that could save the man’s life. He uncorked the crystal vial at his neck, and considered the life-giving water it contained. There was precious little left. Yorick was unsure if it was enough to save the man, and even if it did…

Yorick was forced to face the truth. In trying to save the man, he was just chasing the memory of his former life, when this cursed place was called the Blessed Isles. The souls in the Mist had taunted him, but they’d taunted him with the truth. This man was doomed, and if Yorick used the Tears of Life, he would be too. He closed the vial and let it rest against his neck.

Stepping back from the table, Yorick watched the man’s chest rise and fall one last time. The Black Mist filled the room, spirits clawing out from it in anticipation. The Mist shivered eagerly, then ripped the dead man’s soul from his body. It uttered a faint, feeble cry before it was devoured by its new host.

Yorick stood motionless in the room and uttered a barely remembered prayer. He looked at the soulless husk on the table, a bitter reminder of the task he had yet to complete. While the curse of the Ruination remained, anyone who came to these isles would suffer the same fate. He had to bring peace to these cursed islands, but after years of searching, all he had found were whispers about a ruined king.

He needed answers.

With a single motion of Yorick’s hand, a thin strand of Mist poured into the man’s body. A moment later, it rose from the table, barely sentient. But it could see, it could hear, and it could walk.

“Help me,” said Yorick.

The body shambled out the door of the infirmary, its sloughing footsteps echoing through the halls of the monastery. It continued out into the foul air of the cemetery, walking through the rows of emptied graves.

Yorick watched as the corpse trudged toward the center of the isles until it disappeared into the Mist. Perhaps this one would return with the answer.

Yi frowned at Master Doran as the elder scrambled up the path toward him. Like a mud crab during mating season. It was a less than courteous thought, but given the master artisan’s age, it was a compliment of sorts.

He gave a short bow toward the gray-haired weaponsmith, cupping his hands together in greeting. Red faced, Doran replied without slowing, his hand waving in rhythm with his gasps for breath.

“I’m here, I’m here! Sorry for being a little late. These old bones overslept today.”

Yi shot a glance at the midday sun. A little late indeed, if that meant an entire morning.

“From time, all things spring forth,” Yi recited, his brows furrowed. “Morning dew dawns. Evening mists fall. Thus are born the sun, moon, and stars.”

Doran paused, his waterskin halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“The opening verse from ‘The Compilation of Mandates.’ Have you never heard of it, master?” Yi could hardly believe it. It was a famous verse, most often used to chastise the tardy. “That poem is one of Buxii’s classics.”

The elder stroked his beard, face scrunched in confusion. “Who?”

Yi’s eyes narrowed. Master Buxii was the greatest poet in Ionian history. Before Yi had learned the names of all his extended family, his father had taught him to recite Buxii’s “The Glow of Sunset Among the Mountains.”

“Never mind.” Yi cleared his throat. “My master has informed me of the importance of today’s training. I am to follow your instructions.”

Doran chuckled. “He called this training? No wonder you arrived so early.”

He must be joking. Yi had met Doran before, at his parents’ workshop. Fair and Emai respected him greatly—though he was once an outsider to the village, Wuju’s smiths and masters had embraced him, so legendary was his skill with hammer and anvil. Yet the similarities between Yi’s parents and Doran ended with their professions. The elder weaponsmith was unkempt, absentminded, and known to be eccentric. And though Yi’s parents knew and respected the great poets, Doran apparently did not.

Not for the first time, Yi questioned what this strange weaponsmith had to teach him about the sacred art of Wuju.

He forced his lips into a tight smile. “When do we begin, master?”

“Well, to this old man, we have all the time in the world. But to you…”

Doran packed up his waterskin and turned to glance up the road he had just traveled—a narrow and winding shepherd’s path leading to the village of Wuju. As he turned, Yi noticed the load Doran carried on his shoulders: a basket weaved from bamboo, covered with thick takin hide. It was clearly meant for long journeys.

“You’re what, a mere six moons into swordsman training, and facing your first little setback. Why so impatient?” Doran said.

Yi tensed. It was much more than a little setback—it was a problem that could make him unfit to continue training in Wuju style. He clenched and released the sheath of his sword in an attempt to center himself. This trick, taught to him by his fellow disciples, proved fairly ineffective at the moment.

“Master,” he said softly. “I have been studying Wuju swordsmanship for four seasons.”

“Oh! You’re right! You’re fifteen summers now.” Doran pinched Yi’s bicep with an exaggerated look of surprise. “No wonder you’re so strong. You must have been practicing those sword strikes every sunrise, eh?”

Yi had never shirked any assignment his master had given him, whether it was practicing his sword strikes, meditating, or reciting poetry. In fact, he worked harder than his fellow apprentices and most of the older disciples. He could perform every stance and move in Wuju style with incredible precision, enter a meditative state with impeccable speed and form, and recite most of the poems, songs, and scriptures in the Wuju texts. Yet in spite of all his achievements, he had hit an embarrassing plateau in his progress.

Yi couldn’t keep a bitter smile from creeping across his face. “About four thousand times every day.”

Doran whistled. “Four thousand sword strikes a day? Are you training to be a blacksmith?”

The young swordsman crossed his arms. Repetition was the essence of a fundamental doctrine of Wuju: The Trunk Is Sturdier than the Branch. Did Doran not even know that?

Before Yi could respond, Doran removed the bamboo basket from his back and thrust it into his arms. “There you go, then. A fitting load for a strong young man.”

He massaged his shoulder as he strode away from Yi. Momentarily stunned, Yi ran to catch up.

“Master? Where are you headed? This path leads south.”

“Don’t you worry,” Doran said. “I can still tell north from south.”

“But what about the training?”

“You really want to train that much?” Doran sauntered forward, putting both hands behind his back. “Then let us begin.”

Yi paused. South of the Wuju village was nothing but uninhabited woods. Unless Doran’s plan was to go wild boar hunting, there wasn’t much “training” to be done there.

But he had promised his master he would obey the old man, and so he slung the bamboo basket over his shoulders, and followed.

Yi had never set foot on this path before—he had never even heard of its existence.

The path was marked by stepping stones that were deep in the soil, mostly broken by time and neglect. Wild grass grew between them, sometimes as tall as Yi’s shins. At first, he suspected that this route would lead to some abandoned shrine or settlement. In the mountainous island of Bahrl, ancient ruins were said to lie undisturbed in the woods outside villages and towns.

They had trekked southward for some time, and the weaponsmith’s promise of training hadn’t materialized. Irritated, Yi shifted the bamboo basket on his shoulders. “Master, what exactly am I carrying? It’s heavy.”

“Swords,” Doran replied without turning to face him. “All swords.”

Yi raised an eyebrow. Doran crafted swords exclusively for Wuju swordsmen, and he only made a few every season.

“Are these blades all forged by you, Master Doran?”

“Three of them are. As for the rest…” Doran paused, as if trying to find the right words. “Those were entrusted to me by my peers.”

“You mean other weaponsmiths? Why would they give you their swords?”

Yi absentmindedly peered over his shoulder to look at the basket, promptly tripping over an oddly shaped stone. He staggered as he caught his balance.

“Hey! Watch it!” Doran quickly rebalanced the basket on Yi’s shoulders. “One of them is for you, you know. If you bend it, I’m sure you’ll blame me later.”

“For—for me? Is it a sharpened blade?”

“Of course it is. I don’t craft unsharpened swords.”

Only those who truly understood the Wuju philosophy of bloodless combat were given the privilege of wielding sharpened blades, as a testament to the swordsman’s self-control. And one handcrafted by Master Doran… Many senior disciples had endured over ten summers of training before receiving such an honor, yet Yi had only been training for four seasons. The young swordsman was flattered.

However, his excitement was fleeting, and he cast his eyes down. Doran seemed to notice the change in mood. The two walked in silence for a few paces before the weaponsmith gently said, “I heard from your master that you’re having some trouble connecting with the spirit realm.”

Yi didn’t answer right away, so great was his shame. When he finally spoke, he said, “Connecting isn’t the problem. If I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t have been accepted into the Wuju school.” He scratched the back of his head. “Yet I can’t seem to draw power from it. Sometimes I can draw a little, but I can’t imbue my weapon with it.”

“Could it simply be that it’s not yet your time? Evoking the spirit realm’s energy…” Doran smiled as he stroked his beard. “When it happens might simply come down to the whims of fate.”

Yi wanted to tell Doran he was wrong—the ability to draw power from the spirit realm wasn’t something to be negotiated with fate. And that’s what worried him. Perhaps he was failing because he lacked the innate talent. Perhaps it was his fate that he’d never succeed.

Yet he bit his tongue. He didn’t want to appear impudent, and he still clung to the hope that today’s “training” would help him, however slim the chance.

“Hm. Perhaps you’re right,” Yi finally replied.

The muddy path became more difficult to walk, as roots and brambles crowded over the broken stones. While earlier, Yi could occasionally spot the footprints of other travelers, there was now no sign that any living soul had passed through here before. The only sound was the summer wind whistling through the dense trees.

“Master Doran, have you come this way before?”

“Mhm. I take this path once every four seasons. Your master even accompanied me two or three times.”

Yi was surprised. “Master Hurong? I’ve never heard him say so.”

“I’m sure he will, eventually.” Doran waved him off before picking up his pace. From his swift strides, it was hard to remember he was an elder of almost sixty summers. Not much like a mud crab after all.

He’s brought other swordsmen with him. Does he need a bodyguard? Is this the training—a chance to practice my mercy strokes? Yi welcomed the prospect.

“Have you ever met any threats on this path, master?”

“None at all.” Doran shook his head with a smile. “But keep a good grip on that sword of yours, son. My walking of this path has nothing to do with yours. Even if I had walked this path a thousand times without encountering any danger, it doesn’t mean you definitely won’t.”

As if on cue, a sharp bird-like screech rang out.

Yi halted and grasped the hilt of his unedged sword, lifting it to his chest. He recognized the sound as the cry of a raptor—a dangerous species of wild fowl usually found deep within forests.

The swordsman clenched his teeth, and scanned the tree line.

Rolling his eyes, Doran gestured forward. “Do you see those mountains over there?”

Straight ahead, an unbroken range of peaks stretched across the horizon. They were not particularly high, but they went on as far as the eye could see.

The woods had been silent since the raptor’s call, so Yi lowered his sword. “We’re going mountain climbing?” he asked, trying to hide his annoyance.

“You’re from Bahrl,” Doran replied, patting Yi’s chest with the back of his hand. “Surely you’re not afraid of some hills?”

Yi looked up. A golden, dazzling sun hung upon a cloudless blue canvas. It actually was a good day for a hike, he had to admit.

He squared his shoulders and pressed forward.

After skirting a grove and crossing a stream, they finally closed in on the mountains. They were well outside Wuju territory by now, and beyond the range the elders considered wise to travel. Yet Doran had yet to show any signs of slowing down.

Once they reached the first incline, they ascended a series of stone steps. They might have been well traveled in the past, but now they were broken, covered in weeds and slippery mud. The steps abruptly ended at a steep cliff face that was roughly the height of three men, and before Yi could ask, Doran had already grabbed a handhold on the rock and started to climb. He reached the top with little effort, turning back to look down at Yi with an expression that said, What are you waiting for?

Scaling a rock wall was an easy feat for just about any young person from Wuju, but Yi had never attempted this sort of climb while carrying a heavy load. The task was even more difficult than it looked. After he finally summited the cliff, it was quite some time before he caught his breath.

At last, he stood up straight and dusted off his clothes, only to stop as his eyes locked on a stone tablet before him, a single word etched on it. He could just barely make out the weather-worn Ionian characters.

Mistfall.

“We still have time.” Doran sat down beside the stone tablet and took a sip from his waterskin. “Let’s rest.”

He pulled a rice cake from some mysterious pouch or hidden pocket, and began munching away. After a few bites, Doran looked up as if he had suddenly remembered something. He jabbed the remnant of the rice cake at Yi, who was still studying the stone tablet. Seeing the jagged teeth marks on the offering, Yi shook his head.

“Master, when you said we still have time, you meant for my training, right?”

Doran slapped his knee while chewing on a mouthful of rice cake. “A beard well lathered is half shaved, kid. If you’re really that anxious to start the training, I suggest you rest up here first.”

When Yi saw that Doran had started gnawing on a second rice cake, he suppressed an exasperated sigh. Seeking to hide his impatience, he examined his surroundings.

Apart from the stone tablet, Yi noticed a few ancient ruins hidden under thick clusters of vines and shrubbery. Though only broken columns and walls were left, he could tell that this majestic and bold architecture was entirely different from that of Wuju’s pagodas.

Doran pointed toward the ruins. “This mountain used to house a shrine—for worshiping a god who fell from grace long before any of us were born. Nobody knows the god’s name, and nobody knows where its believers went. These humble stones are all that remain.”

“Flowers wilt as folks grow old. Even morning stars must return to night,” Yi recited. He then pointed at the stone tablet. “Were they the ones who named this place Mistfall?”

“Later generations carved that. As for the name…” Doran motioned toward the other side of the cliff. “Its meaning will be clear if you look over there.”

Yi peered cautiously over the edge of the cliff. Beneath him, white fog blanketed a valley, and farther in the distance, blue sky met the mountains. The view was breathtaking, its grandeur stretching as far as he could see.

The valley itself wasn’t large. It reminded Yi of a lake, only with swirling silvery mist instead of water. A narrow downward path led from the cliff and disappeared into the depths.

“You see that?” Doran asked. “That’s where we’re going.”

“There? Into the valley?”

“That’s right.”

After a long day of trekking through empty wilderness, his training ever more elusive, Yi couldn’t stomach any more nonsense.

“Master, just what kind of training are we doing?” he blurted out.

“All I can say is, the journey will be rough, which is why you should take this respite more seriously.”

Yi swallowed his frustration, as it was clear that Doran was not going to explain further. He found a slab of flat stone opposite the old weaponsmith, and sat down, placing the bamboo basket next to him.

Forget rest. At least this place was perfect for practicing meditation.

Yi closed his eyes and started to breathe deeply and slowly. Perhaps it was due to the unfamiliar environment, but he took a while longer than usual to enter his meditative state. In that space between unconsciousness and waking, a lightness cascaded through his body. And at the tip of this lightness, a bright and unusual object emerged. It was like a spark, illuminating every corner of his mind.

A spirit.

It wasn’t uncommon for Yi to encounter spirits while meditating. They visited him more often than they did most of his fellow disciples. It was probably a good thing, for it meant that he was closer to the spiritual realm, and he ought to be skilled at drawing energy from it.

Ought to be.

Yi focused on the white light, purging his mind of all other thoughts. He soon realized that this was no average spirit. He tried to grasp it, feeling how it pulsed. To his surprise, he merged with the entity, disappearing in the blinding light.

He forced his eyes open, and found himself sitting under a gigantic silverwood tree—the one that stood at the entrance to Wuju. Yet the buildings in the distance looked strange and unfamiliar.

Flustered, Yi stood and walked into the village, where he saw familiar figures—his father, mother, fellow disciples, even his neighbor’s black cat, Little Beauty, and the chief elder’s dog, Goldie. They all seemed to be engrossed in their own world, ignoring Yi. These must be visions, he thought. He calmed himself as he continued down the main road.

Then he saw something that made him freeze in his tracks. “Master Doran?”

The elder weaponsmith spared Yi a glance before turning back to his work. But he was not crafting swords—where a furnace, smithing tools, and an anvil should have been, there was only a flower pot with tender seedlings. With a delirious grin, the artisan slowly raised his arms over his head, and the seedlings in the pot curled and stretched in response. They grew at an unimaginable pace, sprouting leaves until they took the shape of a small juniper tree. Doran examined it closely, looking somewhat unsatisfied. He then raised his arms a few more times. The tree changed its form, swaying merrily in the wind before becoming a weeping willow.

Bewildered, Yi turned his gaze toward the rest of the village, noticing for the first time that each and every house was covered in lush, colorful, and even grotesque vegetation. Many dwellings looked like they had grown out of solid rock, while others twisted into forms that resembled people—not just in shape, but in their movements.

As Yi meandered aimlessly, a clarion sounded from the village center. Nearly every villager stopped what they were doing and strode toward the mountainside on the other end of town.

A waterfall ran down the mountain, obscuring a cave behind it. Doran was the first villager to arrive. He raised his arms, parting the water so he could pass, dry as can be. Other villagers promptly followed suit, entering the cave one by one. But when Yi raised his arms, it had no effect on the cascading water.

It’s just a vision, he reassured himself. It doesn’t matter if I get wet.

He stepped through the waterfall, and found himself in a massive chamber. Thousands upon thousands of candles adorned the space. In the center of the cave were the villagers who entered before him, conversing in a language Yi could not understand. In the opposite corner, he spotted his Wuju master, Hurong, standing with a number of other highly respected elders from the village.

Strange ridges and lines were carved into the stone walls, and the patterns seemed to shift as Master Hurong spoke and gestured. It looked like a living calligraphy painting—no, not a painting. Some sort of map.

The elders concluded their discussion, exchanging glances and nods. Yi’s master then raised his right arm and snapped his fingers. With the ease of a door being thrown open, an entire wall sundered, right up to the ceiling, revealing the sky as streaks of blinding sunlight filled the cavern. Outside was a sheer drop to the distant ground.

With a leap, Master Hurong transformed into a vibrant blue Bahrl jay and took to the air, soaring out of the mountain and into the clouds. Next came the other elders and villagers—after turning into birds, they emptied the broken cave in a chorus of squawks, leaving behind only Yi and Doran.

Knowing he could not communicate with Doran, Yi nodded respectfully and prepared to take his leave. He was shocked when Doran called out to him in a language he could understand, his voice cold and deep.

“You. You walk the path of Wuju?”

Yi froze, staring wordlessly at the weaponsmith.

“I have met you Wuju practitioners before,” Doran said, his face impassive. Yi hadn’t realized how strange his eyes were—crimson irises transfixed him, shining with an eerie light, devoid of any semblance of life. “You take great pains to wring out what little power you can from the spirit realm, only to put it in a weapon—how tawdry. Yet this poor mimicry is still enough to allow you to enter the domain of the strong.”

“Mimicry?” Yi had never heard anyone disparage Wuju style before. “Mimicry of whom?”

Doran ignored the question, instead pointing toward the gradually closing gap in the cave walls. “Go. Follow them.”

Yi looked up at the sky. This is ridiculous. “But I can’t fly.”

“You can.”

Doran’s voice had come from behind him. Yi whirled around to see the weaponsmith standing outside the cave entrance, fingers steepled. “You just don’t know how to do it yet.”

The entrance and the gap in the cave walls slammed shut, sealing Yi inside. His only escape was an opening far above his head. It seemed this crimson-eyed Doran wished to compel Yi to fly out of the mountain like the others.

Yi scoffed, then sat down on the stone floor, crossed his legs, and closed his eyes. Fly out? That wouldn’t be necessary. Visions were just like dreams: no matter how bizarre they got, one only had to wake up for it all to become but a passing fancy.

Yi gasped as he opened his eyes, finding himself back on the stone slab near Mistfall, right opposite where Doran sat. The old weaponsmith didn’t seem to notice Yi’s sudden waking, so engrossed was he with his own thoughts.

Yi pinched his earlobe. He did this whenever he returned from a vision, to make sure he was indeed back in reality. Yet the vision had been so vivid, so real, that even the pinch did not make him feel grounded.

“Master?”

“Hmm?” Doran turned to look at him. “What?”

Yi gazed into Doran’s dark brown eyes. “How long have I been meditating?”

“You pretty much just sat down. Why?”

Yi rubbed his lips. He wouldn’t share an experience he did not fully understand himself.

“It’s no matter. Let’s get going, shall we?”

Just as Doran had warned, the path leading down into the sea of mist was perilous. A treacherous green moss grew on the stone stairs, each step requiring meticulous care. The task was made more difficult by carrying a heavy basket full of swords, but Yi offered no complaint—he wouldn’t give Doran the satisfaction.

It became clear that Doran was not the only one who knew of this secret location. As they approached the mists, Yi saw a relatively new wooden board to the side of the path, a warning of danger scrawled across it. The shoddy handwriting and misspellings hinted that it had been penned by an uneducated hunter.

Yi couldn’t tell if his senses were playing tricks on him, but as he passed the wooden board, it grew cold. It had been a hot summer day, yet frigid winds swirled around him now. On top of that, his vision started to blur as a strange, dense fog wrapped around him and Doran.

He followed closely behind the elder, tightly gripping the hilt of his blade and scanning his surroundings, fearing that something might leap out of the fog.

“This mist isn’t normal,” Yi muttered. “Spirits linger here. We should wait and return after they are gone.”

“The spirits will never leave,” Doran replied, shaking his head. “They have lived in this place longer than people have lived in Ionia. Don’t worry. We won’t be here for long.” He gestured ahead of him. “Come, you have better eyes than I. Help me find a sword.”

Yi frowned. “Find a sword? Here?”

“A Placidium flamberge, to be exact. It should be pretty obvious,” Doran explained. “I left it as a marker the last time I came here.”

Yi looked around blankly. Everything was covered in a thick white blanket of mist. Never mind finding a Placidium flamberge—it was barely possible to spot someone standing just two steps away. With no good place to start, Yi pretended to search the ground on either side.

He had only taken a few more steps when his stomach lurched. He suddenly felt as though his body was becoming lighter and lighter. Even the weight of the bamboo basket had disappeared.

“Master Doran,” Yi said uneasily.

But Doran neither slowed nor turned back, and instead picked up his pace. Alarmed, Yi tried to catch up, but the weaponsmith slipped farther away. It wasn’t long before Doran vanished completely in the white mist. Yi watched as the same mist devoured him—it was so dense that he couldn’t see his own legs. He was weightless and bodiless, floating up through the impossible fog.

No. He wasn’t simply floating. He was soaring, the mists becoming clouds and the chill air turning into wind.

He must be in another vision. This time, however, the spirits hadn’t given any warning before they whisked him away.

Feeling disoriented, he tried to stretch his arms out for balance—but a pair of magnificent jade wings spread out from him instead.

I’ve become a bird!

As he soared through the sky, a long coastline appeared. A salty sea breeze swept over him as cerulean ocean waves crashed against the shore. The land felt like home, and yet at the edge of the beach loomed a dark gray structure, an edifice that had no place in Ionia.

Is that… is that a monument of some kind? If it hadn’t been for the precise construction, it could have been taken for a mountain. As he flew closer, he saw it was three monstrous towers, each one of incredible size, sharing a single base.

This cannot possibly be the craftsmanship of mortals.

Yi had never seen anything like this. The towers were made of thousands of large stones, polished and carved into perfect blocks, each the height of a grown swordsman.

A flock of vibrantly colored birds burst from the clouds and glided toward the fortress. Unsure if it was by his own volition, Yi winged over to join them, flying with great speed.

He followed a bright red bird, dashing between the three towers. The bird left Yi behind as it dived for the base of the structure, tumbling as it landed. As it stood, it took the shape of a man—the crimson-eyed Master Doran. He beckoned as he peered up at Yi, still spiraling overhead.

Yi landed on Doran’s shoulder, then lightly tumbled to the ground. As he regained his feet, he discovered that his human legs had returned, along with the rest of his body.

“It appears you can fly,” Doran said.

Invigorated, Yi said breathlessly, “Master Doran—”

But Doran shook his head. “No. He is but a form I’ve taken.”

He said no more, and Yi blinked. Why would this spirit take the form of Doran, of all people?

He stretched his back, and his gaze fell on the massive towers. “What is this place?”

“You call it Bahrl.” The spirit who looked like Doran pointed at the snakelike coastline, where a squad of warriors armed with pikes and glaives patrolled the beach. Their weapons and armor looked foreign. “They call it the Other Shore. We call it home.”

“Who are they? And who is this we?”

Yi turned to look at the spirit, but he was already gone. Only a few red and white feathers remained.

Absurd.

Yi wanted to leave this vision as he had the last one, but before he could start meditating, a loud, rhythmic noise came from far away—the loudest he had ever heard. It was the clanging of metal and the cries of men. His curiosity piqued, he followed the sound to its source.

As Yi passed by the huge towers, it became even more apparent that their size defied reality. Each tower could house the entire Wuju village and more. But why would anyone build houses so large and ugly? It made no sense.

Lost in his thoughts, Yi almost bumped into a burly passerby. He wore a shining metal helmet, yet his chest was bare, and he wielded a strange-looking halberd.

Just like the villagers in Yi’s previous vision, the people of this vision didn’t pay him much mind. The foreign man paused briefly, then continued on his way. There were a few other warriors patrolling the area, radiating a resolute air of strength. They also let Yi pass.

As Yi approached an earthen rampart, the noise became deafening. He could hear war drums pounding, punctuated by shouting.

Yi swallowed as he climbed up the rampart, and carefully craned his neck so he could see what lay beyond.

Thousands of soldiers packed a large, open square, easily outnumbering the people of Wuju. Their rows were as neat as their war banners, and they were geared with all sorts of different equipment. Some had spiked steel plate armor, some donned thick animal hides, and some wore only thin cloth robes. Though these soldiers were disparate in appearance, they were united in purpose, beating their chests in rhythm with the drums and their war cries.

“Tell me, disciple of Wuju,” a cold voice called from behind him. “What do you see?”

Yi gripped his sheath and spun around, only to see the crimson-eyed spirit standing at the bottom of the rampart. He climbed up level with Yi and placed his hands lightly upon the top of the earthwork.

“Give me your first impressions,” the spirit said.

Yi retorted with questions of his own. “Who are they? Why are you showing me this?”

But the spirit did not yield. “The first word,” he pressed. “The first one that comes to mind.”

“The first word…” Yi gazed at the sea of warriors again. “Strength,” he said finally.

“Strength. Where do you see strength?”

“Where?” Yi scratched his head. “Each warrior possesses the ferocity of the tiger, the strength of the great bears. They wield sharp blades and shining armor. Their call roars across these beaches—”

“So that is what you see. Ah, child. This is why you are here.” The spirit’s expression darkened as he nodded. He pointed behind the young swordsman. “The direction of your gaze is mistaken. The harder you train, the further you will be from your goal.”

Yi turned to look behind him. But before he could see anything, the spirit shoved him, knocking him from the rampart so he tumbled to the ground, which was now impossibly far below. Even knowing he was in a vision, Yi couldn’t help but cry out in shock.

He squeezed his eyes shut as the ground rushed up toward him.

When he reopened them, he was sitting down, thick mist swirling around him, the bamboo basket at his back. He suspected he was back in Mistfall, but he pinched his earlobes—he had to be sure that he had left the vision. Once he was satisfied, he looked to the sky.

“Why can’t he just leave me alone?” Yi groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. “And what in the world was he talking about?”

As Yi wiped the sweat off his brow and heaved a few sighs of relief, Doran came hobbling out of the fog, hugging something in his arms. He looked up and down at Yi.

“Hey, kid, what happened? Why are you sitting down?” The weaponsmith held an oddly shaped sword with an undulating, snakelike blade. This was probably the Placidium flamberge he had been looking for.

“Master Doran,” Yi said. “When you came here with my master, did you encounter anything strange?”

“Here in the fog?” Doran squinted his eyes. “What trouble have you gotten into?”

Unsure how to explain, Yi stood up and shook his head, slinging the bamboo basket over his shoulders. “I’m just worried that this place might not be safe. The mist has only grown thicker since we arrived.”

“Oh, no need to worry,” Doran replied as he stuck the flamberge into the ground. “The mist will soon disperse. And we will be safe as long as we leave before it sets in again.”

“The mist will disperse? Why?”

“Every four seasons, there is one sundown when the mists recede. That is today, during this very sundown.”

Just then, Yi noticed that the air was losing its chill. Within moments, the mist thinned out at astonishing speed.

“This is—”

Doran put a finger on his lips, motioning for Yi to stay silent. Just as the sun touched the zenith of a faraway mountain, the entire valley was laid bare. Yi clasped his hands over his mouth and took a huge breath, unable to believe the scene unfolding before him.

“Why does the mist disperse?” Doran rested his hands on the hilt of the flamberge. “Maybe the spirits here are commemorating that one momentous sunset, countless summers ago…”

In all his fifteen summers, the fiercest combat Yi had witnessed was when a hunter fought a wild boar. The former lost a finger while the latter lost its head. As far as Yi knew, Ionia had always been a pure and peaceful land, representing harmony. Yet, what lay before him exuded a foul aura. It was completely at odds with the Ionia that Yi knew.

Countless blades were stuck in the ground. Starting from just ten paces away, the vast ocean of weapons spread to the foot of the distant mountains, washing over the valley. At the center were ten large claymores. Actually, it would be wrong to call them large. They were gargantuan. With the tips of the swords buried underground, Yi couldn’t determine their full scale. The hilts alone were the height of a grown swordsman, and just the visible portions of the blades were the height of seven or eight, like the Great Pagoda of Wuju.

“This was the site of an ancient battle.” Doran patted Yi on the shoulder. “The combatants left their weapons here. The spirits protect each and every one, helping them resist the corrosion of time. As the eons went by, this became a sacred land. Over time, those who vowed never again to participate in the violence and bloodshed of war started coming here to leave their blades as well.”

Yi looked around. “I’ve never heard of a place like this…”

“What I speak of happened a long, long time ago. Some of these weapons might be older than your oldest ancestors. Nowadays, there is hardly anyone left who still remembers this tradition. And of those who do, most choose not to disturb the spirits.”

“Then why do you come here, Master Doran?”

“It used to be rumored that Mistfall’s spirits would bless weapons with power in combat. When I finally found my way here, I discovered the truth was just the opposite. The ancient battle ripped apart the balance in this place. That’s why the spirits in the valley hate violence. While they do bless weapons, their blessings lose their effect the moment the blades are used for bloodshed. Most swordsmiths stopped coming after they realized this. I’m the only one who has been able to win blessings that last. Have you figured out why?”

Yi nodded. “It’s because you only craft swords for Wuju bladesmen, and we abstain from bloodshed and killing.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly why I remained in Wuju. All my life, I’ve wanted to create the best blades in the world—but not for battle. And only you Wuju bladesmen see weapons the same way.” Doran gestured at the bamboo basket on Yi’s back. “Oh, you can put that down now.”

Yi gladly removed the heavy load from his shoulders.

“We’ll plant those here today to be blessed—that includes the blade I made for you. Then I’ll retrieve the swords I left behind last time.”

The two walked deeper into the valley. As they got closer to the center of the battlefield, there were other kinds of weapons in the ground. While some resembled conventional blades, their dimensions were either too large or too small for Yi to wield, and the ones that he could wield had forms he’d never seen before. Yi marveled at who could have used them.

“Look! Here we are. My garden!”

Doran was pointing at a single-edged sword with a magnificent cross guard. The weapon was fit for a human swordsman, and looked much newer than the others—as if it had been forged yesterday.

Upon closer inspection, Yi noticed something even more interesting—a paper amulet was dangling from the hilt on a thin red string. In fact, quite a few swords in the ground had paper amulets as well. Amulets were usually used for prayers and blessings. This was the first time Yi had seen them attached to weapons.

Doran carefully pulled the single-edged sword out of the soil and removed the amulet, delicately placing the paper on the ground. After scrutinizing the blade, he turned to another sword stuck in the ground, and began this process once again, like a farmer harvesting his crops.

Like transplanting rice stalks, Yi mused. He rolled up his sleeves and grasped the hilt of a long sword with an amulet.

“Don’t touch that!” Doran shouted. “That was left behind by another swordsmith. It has been here for some time now. Leave it in the ground.”

Yi released the weapon, but he accidentally unraveled the red string attaching the amulet to the hilt. He picked up the paper, reading the Ionian text written on it—a simple poem.

Deafening thunder in spring;

Torrential rains in summer;

Easterly gales in autumn;

Flying snow in winter.

Yi furrowed his brow. “What is this?”

The older man looked up as he opened the basket. “That’s a poem the swordsmith wrote. What do you think?”

Yi took a closer look—the writer’s skill with calligraphy and poetry was definitely above average. Still, it read more like a toast than a poem. “It’s adequate. But what’s the purpose of writing poems here?”

“We write poems to honor the spirits.” As he knelt down, Doran took a large sip of water, then reached into his satchel and pulled out a calligraphy brush coated in dried ink. He dabbed it on his tongue. “If the spirits in Wuju can understand poetry, why not the spirits here?” Doran motioned to the three blank amulets on the ground before him. “The swordsmiths who asked me to drop off their swords prepared their amulets in advance, so I just have to write the poems for mine.”

“Master Doran, you’re going to write poems? Does this mean you actually study poetry?” Yi walked over as Doran began to write. “So you were just teasing me when you said you had no idea who Buxii was.”

The artisan gave him a sly grin. His calligraphy was unrestrained, with audacious strokes sweeping across the paper. A lengthy verse quickly took form.

“Let’s have a look.” Yi bent down and read aloud. “No wars today, just a sip of wine to wash down duck eggs. Tastes yummy—” He couldn’t contain his outrage. “Doran! Master! What are you writing?”

Doran stroked his beard with pride. “Do you like it?”

“This isn’t even poetry!” Yi gesticulated wildly. “There’s no rhythm, no rhyme, the lines don’t relate, and even the basic format of a poem is nowhere to be found!”

“The most important part of a poem is the feeling, not the form.” Doran grinned as he jabbed a finger at his chest. “It’s the theme of the heart. Rhythm and rhyme are only the flourishes decorating a poem.”

Yi stared blankly at him. “But—what you just wrote. Where are the feelings and themes?”

“This is my experience of war.” Doran gazed at the amulet. “When you’re an old man like me, who has witnessed bloodshed and killing, you’ll understand why a sip of wine alongside a duck egg is worthy of poetry and praise.”

Yi raised an eyebrow, turning to the other weapons with amulets. Did these swordsmiths write questionable poetry as well?

He approached another sword and read its amulet. “Indefatigable horrors and demons, alongside inexhaustible evils and villains…”

This poem was attached to a ceremonial blade, not intended for combat. Based on the verse, Yi suspected it belonged to an adjudicator or roaming swordsman.

Doran, still immersed in his own writing, glanced at the young man. “Oh, that one’s by Laka. She’s famous at the Placidium. Her swords cost a fortune.”

Yi had never been to the Placidium of Navori, though he’d heard merchants call it a sanctuary. Perhaps it was slightly bigger than Wuju?

He moved on to another ceremonial blade, this one used as a cane. A cooling fragrance of insect-repelling mint emanated from its teakwood handle.

Blind faith ruins minds;

Blind loyalty ruins lives.

When the butcher’s knife strikes the ground,

All are wounded, and the self is destroyed.

Yi was only halfway through reading the verse when Doran interrupted. “That would be Morya. He always uses the best materials for the stingiest of clients—priests, monks, and the like. He only gets poorer with every weapon he crafts. He still owes me money!”

Doran gestured with his brush to a spot near Yi. “Oh, right! Take a look at that one! That’s a good one!”

Yi spun around to find the sword Doran had indicated: a greatsword with a serrated edge, with a tiny blue amulet hanging from the hilt.

The text on the amulet was in a foreign language. Yi couldn’t read any of it except for the signature at the end. Lear, scrawled in Ionian.

“Lear is an absolute genius. He lives on the southern isles, and has even been to Zaun,” Doran said.

“Where’s… Zaun?”

“Don’t ask.”

After reading amulet after amulet, Yi let out a relieved sigh. It seemed that Doran was the only person in all of Mistfall who wrote such non-poetic poems.

Yi turned to the older man. “Master Doran, the works of the others at least resemble poetry. You’re the only one who’s careless.”

Doran paused his brush. “Careless?”

“Feelings are important, but a poem is defined by its form.” Yi spoke with utmost seriousness. “If you’re going to write poetry, you should follow tradition. This is but basic courtesy and respect to the spirits.”

“Interesting.” Doran smiled. “Your master once said the same thing to me… and he wasn’t even the Wuju leader back then.”

“That’s because we’re both Wuju swordsmen.” Yi puffed out his chest. “It’s our duty to protect the old ways. As such, it is my duty to tell you that what you’re doing is wrong.” Yi looked around him. “No, your poetry isn’t the real problem. The fact that we’re here—that’s the problem. Master Doran, you are disturbing these spirits for your selfish hope of crafting better swords.”

“Both Wuju swordsmen…” Doran nodded. “How much do you really understand of Wuju?”

Yi’s frustration finally boiled over. He hid his clenched right fist behind his back and spoke with a voice that trembled with suppressed fury.

“I’ve indeed only been training for four seasons, and barely understand the art of Wuju. But what do you know? You may be a respected weaponsmith, but you have never been through a single day of swordsmanship training, have you? Who are you to question my understanding?”

Doran was undaunted. “Heh, interesting. Why do I have to understand swordsmanship? You’re the one who’s supposed to be training today.”

Disbelieving his ears, Yi took half a step forward. “Training? You’ve been making me climb mountains, rest, search for swords. So when exactly is the training going to start?!”

Doran was silent for a while, before finally setting his brush on the ground. “Your master told me that the most vital knowledge cannot be taught with words. It can only be learned through epiphany. It was at this very place, years ago, that he found the answers he had been seeking.”

The young man froze. The weaponsmith was referring to one of the Seven Fundamental Doctrines of Wuju, The Stunted Flower Blooms Best in Rain. He waited for Doran to continue.

“I have no idea how you Wuju bladesmen train. That’s why I asked you how much you have understood thus far.” Doran paused. “Or have you learned nothing at all?”

Embarrassed, Yi looked away. “My apologies, Master Doran. Did Master Hurong tell you how he reached his epiphany?”

“I didn’t ask, but he left behind a poem at the time.” Doran pointed behind Yi, at an enormous greatsword that towered over the battlefield. “It’s on that sword over there.”

Yi hesitantly made his way to the greatsword. Covered with notches and cracks, the giant blade was damaged beyond repair… however, given its incredible size, a sharp edge wasn’t really needed.

Not seeing any poem, Yi took a few steps to the side to get a better view. He then noticed that the blade was gleaming—the sword appeared to be made of some sort of glass. Curious, Yi stretched out his hand, lightly touching the brilliant shimmer of reflected light.

He blinked.

A thunderous rumble shook the valley as the gargantuan sword was drawn out of the ground.

Yi took a step back, dumbfounded. Ten giants, each the size of a small mountain, stood before him. They were clad in golden armor and strange helmets, and where eyes should have been, two blazing orbs flared, flashing with a sinister glow. Their gigantic swords reflected the rays of the setting sun. In their regalia, holding stalwart stances, they looked like gods descended from the heavens.

Farther away, among the foothills, another fifty giants were slowly making their way over. Holding massive weapons, they stopped and stood still as if awaiting an order.

Hearing a commotion behind him, Yi turned around, only to be greeted by a sea of faces.

At first, they looked familiar—they were villagers from Wuju, except they were hazier, less distinct, and they began to melt like a watercolor painting in the rain.

But then their features became clearer, and Yi realized that these were people unlike any he had encountered before—they had feathers all over their backs, or only three fingers, or green skin. They were tall, with fit physiques. Colorful clothes, some with the appearance of lustrous scales, draped across their lithe frames.

He stood transfixed. “What—what are they?” he breathed.

Yi had no idea when the spirit who looked like Doran had appeared beside him, but there he was, responding coldly with his crimson-eyed stare. “You called them—you called us—the Vastayashai’rei.”

Yi had never heard this long and cumbersome name before. He regarded the spirit, whose outfit made him resemble a crane standing on two feet.

The spirit gestured to the Vastayashai’rei. “We were the victors of this battle.”

Yi’s gaze fell on the army of giants. “How could you possibly have won against these monsters?”

The spirit did not answer.

Ten elders—or what Yi assumed were elders, among these strange beings—emerged from the Vastayashai’rei’s ranks. One made her way to the front, resting one palm over the other and raising her arms above her head. She slammed her hands down on the ground, and the whole valley shook as a fissure tore toward the giants. A deep chasm now separated the two armies.

At the same time, the other nine elders invoked their magic. Some began to dance as others sat cross-legged, and howling gales and a foreboding blanket of dark clouds descended on the battlefield. Thunder roared as lightning flashed across the sky. Standing at the edge of the fissure, another elder conjured a mass of vines, enormous tangles bursting from the earth, intertwining to form a wall the height of six swordsmen.

Such power over the elements was unheard of except in myth. Yi knew he was in a vision, but he couldn’t help but feel awed.

“What do you see now?” the spirit asked. “Is this strength?”

Yi nodded. “Yes, this is strength.”

“Yet we’re equipped with neither sturdy armor nor powerful weapons, nor are we shouting with the fervor of a bloodthirsty army. Where do you see strength?”

“You are conjuring winds, and calling storms, and parting the earth itself. If that’s not strength, what is?”

The spirit pointed at the giants. “You asked me how one could win in a battle against these monsters. The question should be, how will these giants contend with the divine powers that created this very land?”

The behemoths were undaunted by the Vastayashai’rei’s mastery of magic. They threw back their heads and howled with glee, the ten lead giants raising their massive swords and charging. With their sheer size, they seemed like a mountain range crashing toward the Vastayashai’rei.

Yet the Vastayashai’rei did not flinch. The elders advanced as the ranks behind them followed. Some of them bent low and sprang forward, transforming into vulkodalks, scaled snappers, and wolves, the beasts dashing past Yi. Others took to the skies, shifting into avian forms as they soared through the air like arrows. In a flash, the Vastayashai’rei became a stampede hunting down their prey.

The giants were surprisingly nimble. They leapt over the fissure, easily clearing the wall of vines behind it, and dived straight into the pack of beasts.

Each swing of their swords was an unstoppable force. The vanguard of avian warriors fell in waves. Undeterred, their brethren beat their wings, casting enchanted blades of wind at their enemies, gouging shallow lines of red in the gaps between their armor. These strikes would normally cleave a person in two, yet they barely slowed the giants.

The Vastayashai’rei’s ground forces were just as fearless. Several scaled snappers charged the giants, using their bulk to knock them down, while vulkodalks tore into their foes with horns and razor-sharp teeth.

Enormous trees ripped from the earth, sharpened like stakes, their branches cracking like whips. Thunder roiled, and massive bolts of lightning struck with divine fury, blasting craters in the ground. Yet even this apocalyptic scene did not deter the giants. As vines snared their feet, and beasts clambered over them, and some were even brought to their knees and slain, they still continued to fight, and howl, and press forward. They seemed emboldened, increasing their momentum, treading on countless corpses as they tore an opening in the ranks of the bestial army.

The smell of blood wafted through the air, its tang seeming real.

In that moment, one giant noticed Yi’s presence. His fiery eyes glaring, the behemoth headed straight for him. Stunned, the young swordsman retreated a step back, assuming a defensive stance.

As the giant bore down on him, the spirit rested his hand on the sheath of Yi’s sword.

“Winds and rain. Thunder and lightning. Avalanches. Even the body itself. All are mere forms. If you can find their essence, all forms are but a stone’s throw away. That also includes imbuing your blade with power.”

As the spirit spoke, the giant’s footsteps slowed, as did the assault of the Vastayashai’rei. Even the lightning became sluggish, as everything around Yi crawled to a standstill.

Realization dawned on him. “You mean—”

“Wuju style.” The spirit nodded. “Wuju style draws power from the spirit realm. That’s also how the Vastayashai’rei changed their shapes, and manipulated the elements. The only difference is in the degree of power used. I have no idea who founded Wuju style, but they must have been a remarkable mage.”

“That’s impossible!” Yi exclaimed. “We’re swordsmen, not mages.”

“Forms! It doesn’t matter if they’re known as mages, priests, or monks. Those are all merely adopted forms,” the spirit said, exasperated. “The heart of Wuju is magic. The heart of the Wuju school is the people who wield this magic. Every martial stance, every poem, every meditation that you have studied, they all exist for the sake of this magic.”

Yi wanted to refute the spirit—precision in form was an essential part of Wuju!—when suddenly he realized this wasn’t a debate. This spirit was obviously guiding him in the art of Wuju. This had to be the training his master had spoken of!

“Then how do I use this magic?” Yi said. “I have no issues with my swordsmanship and meditation, so why am I failing to draw power from the spirit realm?”

“The issue lies precisely in your bladesmanship and meditation.”

The spirit took the hilt of Yi’s sword and drew the unedged blade, shifting through several stances with the grace of a master. Yi assumed he would demonstrate a few moves, but instead the spirit snapped the sword in two, and tossed it to the ground.

“The sword is not the bearer of the magic. You are. By focusing too much on your swordsmanship and meditation, you are directing all your attention to these useless forms. This is exactly why you lack the instinct every Wuju swordsman should have.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Forget the sword. Forget the enemy. Forget all of your master’s teachings,” the spirit said. “Even in the moment of contact with the spirit realm, forget that you are meditating. Stop wondering if your every move is right or wrong.”

Suddenly, the battle roared back into chaos. The giant picked up speed as he resumed striding toward Yi, raising his sword. And he had nothing but a wooden sheath to defend himself.

“It’s your turn now.” The spirit took a step back. “Ask yourself: how will you defeat an enemy whose strength so severely outmatches your own?”

Yi drew the sheath like a sword and readied his stance, taking shallow breaths.

The giant’s steps shook the ground. This is only a vision, Yi reminded himself, yet he could barely stabilize his breathing.

He felt the magic of the spirit realm surging around him, like a mighty river. In the past, when he had tried to draw this power into his sword, it had eluded him.

Yet the sword was just a form. So was the sheath.

So am I.

How will I defeat an enemy whose strength so severely outmatches my own?

By becoming the river.

The monster swung his sword in a mighty blow.

Almost entirely by instinct, Yi raised his sheath to block the attack. As sheath clashed with sword, the force of the impact reverberated through his entire body. Yet he remained standing. Not only had he withstood the blow, but his flimsy wooden sheath had somehow cut a notch in the giant’s massive weapon.

Encouraged, Yi switched his stance and swung the sheath diagonally at the sword, tearing a gash into it. The giant hesitated, then pulled his weapon back to examine it. Upon seeing the damage to the blade, he bellowed in rage and astonishment. The fiery orbs of his eyes dimmed underneath his helm.

Yi also couldn’t believe what was happening. He gently ran his index finger along the side of the sheath. There wasn’t a single crack or splinter—but it sliced open his fingertip, as though possessing a sharp edge.

“Do you feel it?” The spirit stepped forward and grasped Yi’s hand, holding up his bloody finger. “This power at your command?”

He nodded.

“Remember this feeling, and direct it from beneath your feet to your target.” The spirit gestured to the giant. “Attack with your heart and your body, not your blade.”

Though the spirit still spoke in the language of forms, Yi now understood.

The spirit stepped back just as the giant once again attacked. This time, he knelt down, sweeping his sword near the ground like a sickle harvesting crops.

Now Yi was completely focused. He held his breath, got down on one knee, and raised his arms over his head, shielding his upper body with the sheath—he had never understood the purpose of this stance during his training, but a curtain had lifted, giving him clarity.

Just as the giant’s sword was about to make contact, Yi leapt to his feet, his weapon before him. He dashed with the force of a tsunami, throwing himself against the giant’s attack, sheath slicing toward the sword.

By the time Yi closed his stance and stowed his weapon, the severed half of the giant’s blade had plummeted to the earth like a kite with a broken string.

Thrown by his momentum, the giant crashed to the ground. Just as he started to stand, a bolt of lightning struck him in the back, and dozens of Vastayashai’rei swarmed over him. The behemoth’s eyes showed fury… and fear.

Yi stared at his hands, shaking his head in wonder. “I feel like I can cut through a mountain!”

The spirit nodded. “No armor can withstand attacks by master Wuju swordsmen. As long as you draw enough power, you can indeed sunder a mountain, a forest, or even the entire world.”

Yi was so excited that he clenched his fist and almost started to dance. Seeing this, the spirit quickly cleared his throat. “But remember, this is all a vision.”

“Um, yes, of course.” Yi frowned. What an odd thing for a spirit to say.

“There’s a limit to the amount of power humans can draw from the spirit realm. Thus…” A grin appeared on the spirit’s face. “If you really meet an opponent like this, I suggest you run. You’ll probably fail to slice off even a toenail.”

“Definitely.” Yi rubbed the back of his head. “I understand.” After all, Bahrl was a peaceful place. He’d have no need to sunder such foes.

“I’ve seen many Wuju disciples, but you stand out. Don’t waste your life pursuing useless endeavors.” The spirit gently rested his hands on Yi’s shoulders, assessing him. “I’ll teach you something else, if you’d like.”

Yi’s eyes brightened. “Yes!”

“You grew up in Bahrl, so—”

Yi was suddenly back in Mistfall, staring at the giant blade planted in the ground.

He was drenched in water—water from Doran’s waterskin, which he had just thrown at his face.

“I shook you a couple of times to no avail, so I had to resort to this.” Doran smiled as he handed Yi the skin. “Come, have a drink. You’ll feel better.”

Yi looked up at the sky, letting out a huge sigh. “Gods! Master! Couldn’t you have waited just a moment longer?!”

“Oh?” Doran said. “Were you about to slay the giant, or what?”

“I was just about to learn…” Yi froze. “Wait! Master Doran, you—you’ve seen the vision as well, haven’t you? The battle with the giants?”

“I’ve heard your master speak of it. It seems that you Wuju bladesmen are the only ones who encounter such visions in this place.” Doran leaned forward. “You seem excited. I suppose you discovered something?”

Yi lowered his gaze to his sheath, and drew his unedged sword. He stood before the massive blade, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath with the devotion of a priest at prayer. After a few moments, he raised his sword and swung it, magic coursing through the weapon. So great was his strength that he cleaved through the giant’s sword. Only a shard remained in the earth.

Doran drew a sharp breath. “Whoa!”

“How’s that?” An almost smug grin crept across Yi’s face.

“Who have you been talking to?” Doran said, raising an eyebrow.

Yi was about to tell him that it was a spirit in his likeness, but inspiration suddenly struck. “Master Doran! Could I borrow your brush?”

Doran turned to fetch the ink-soaked brush, and handed it over to Yi. “Why? Are you going to write a poem about your feelings like your master did?”

Yi weighed the brush in his hands before returning to the remnant of the giant’s sword in the ground. Before he began, he ran his palm over it, catching sight of what seemed to be traces of ink—the wind and rain would erase all hints of any calligraphy one were to write here. But that didn’t matter. Whatever he wrote wasn’t meant for the eyes of other visitors.

“The poem my master wrote wasn’t about his feelings,” Yi said as he penned his first word. “It was about his gratitude.”

By the time Yi had finished writing, Doran had packed up the swords in the bamboo basket, and was about to lift it onto his shoulders. Yi rushed over to take the burden himself, but Doran stopped him.

“I’ll carry it. After all, your training today is completed.”

Yi nodded. He looked at the blades Doran was leaving behind to be blessed.

“Master, which one is my blade?”

“None of them. The blade I crafted for you will go to a junior disciple instead.”

“What?” Yi couldn’t believe it. “Junior? Which junior?”

Doran snorted, turned, and walked away, leaving Yi behind.

Yi ran after him. “But why, master?”

The old weaponsmith sighed in bemusement, muttering words only he could hear.

“It’s no longer worthy of you, kid.”

The sea was mirror-smooth and dark. A pirate’s moon hung low on the horizon as it had for the last six nights. Not so much as a whisper of wind stirred the air, only that damned dirge carried from who knew where. Vionax had sailed the oceans around Noxus long enough to know that seas like this only ever presaged ill-fortune. She stood on the Darkwill’s foredeck, training her spyglass on the far ocean, searching for anything she could use to plot their position.

“Nothing but sea in all directions,” she said to the night. “No land in sight and no stars I recognize. Our sails are empty of wind. The oar decks have rowed for days, but no matter which way we turn, land never comes and the moon neither waxes nor wanes.”

She took a moment to rub the heels of her palms against her face. Thirst and hunger growled in her belly and the constant darkness had made it impossible to accurately gauge the passage of time. The Darkwill wasn’t even her ship. She’d been it’s first mate until a Freljordian reaver’s axe had split Captain Mettok’s skull and given her a sudden promotion. The captain and fifteen other Noxian warriors were laid within sewn-up hammocks on the main deck. The growing stench rising from the bodies was the only consistent measure of time’s passing.

She lifted her gaze to the open ocean and her eyes widened as she saw thick black mist rising from the water. Shapes moved in the mist, lambent suggestions of clawed arms and gaping mouths. That damned dirge rang out over the water again, louder now and accompanied by the dolorous peals of a funeral bell.

“The Black Mist,” she said. “All hands on deck!”

She turned and vaulted down to the main deck, running for the quarterdeck and the ship’s wheel. Not that she could do anything to move the ship, but she’d be damned if she’d be found anywhere else. A haunting lament for lost souls drifted over the ship as men stumbled from below decks, and even as terror shivered her spine, Vionax couldn’t deny the poetry in the sound. Tears pricked her eyes and ran down her cheeks, not in fear, but from infinite sadness.

“Let me end your grief.”

The voice in her head was cold and lifeless, the voice of a dead man. It conjured the image of iron-rimmed wheels on a corpse-heaped cart, a knife cutting yet another death mark on a staff. Vionax knew the tales of the Black Mist; she knew to avoid the islands brooding beneath the darkness in the east. She’d thought the ship was far from the Shadow Isles, but she was wrong.

She pulled up short as black mist boiled up over the gunwale, bringing with it howls and screeches of dead things. Wraiths spun overhead, a swirling chorus of the damned, and the Darkwill’s crew cried out in terror at the sight of them. Vionax drew her pistol and cocked the hammer as a figure loomed from the mist; towering and wide-shouldered, robed in tattered vestments like an ancient prelate, yet his shoulders and gaunt skull were armored as a warrior. A chained book hung at his waist and he carried a long staff with its haft notched by countless tally-marks. Spectral light shone at its tip and burned like a fallen star in the palm of his free hand.

“Why do you cry?” said the creature. “I am Karthus, and I bring you a great gift.”

“I don’t want your gift,” said Vionax, pulling the trigger. Her pistol boomed and fire exploded from the barrel. The shot struck the monstrous wraith, but passed through it without harm.

“You mortals,” said Karthus, shaking his helmeted head. “You fear what you do not understand and would turn away from a boon that is freely offered.”

The monster drifted closer, and the dark radiance of his staff bathed the ship’s deck in pale, sickly light. Vionax backed away from the wraith’s chill as her crew fell before the light, their souls drifting like steam from their bodies. Her heel caught on one of the laid out hammocks and she tripped, falling backwards onto her haunches. She pushed herself away from Karthus, scrambling over the bodies of her fellow sailors.

The hammock beneath her moved.

They were all moving, squirming and writhing like fresh-caught fish gasping for air at the bottom of a boat. Tendrils of mist rose from tears in the canvas and between the rough stitches the ship’s sailmaker had used to sew them shut. Faces moved in the mist, faces she’d sailed with for years, men and women she’d fought beside.

The wraith towered over her and the dead crew of the Darkwill stood beside him, their spirit forms limned in moonlight.

“Death is nothing to be feared, Mistress Vionax,” said Karthus. “It will free you from all your pain. It will lift your eyes from your mundane existence and show you the glory of life eternal. Embrace the beauty and wonder of death. Let go of your mortality. You do not need it.”

He held his hand out and the light there swelled to envelop her. She screamed as it pressed through her skin, into muscle, through bone, down to her very soul. The wraith clenched his fist and Vionax cried out as she felt herself being unwoven from the inside out.

“Let your soul fly free,” said Karthus, turning to carve another notch in his staff with a sharpened nail. “You shall feel no pain, no fear, no desire to feel anything but the beauty of what I have to show you. Miracles and wonders await, mortal. Why would you not crave such rapture...?”

“No,” she said with her last breath. “I don’t want to see.”

“It is already done,” said Karthus.

No, no, that seat’s not taken. Pull up a chair, and sink a few, friend... Though that might be a poor turn o’ phrase, given my history. Heh.

Aye, I’ve seen a few shipwrecks. Been in one me self, as it goes, back when I was young like you. Her name was the Ophidian, that ship, pulled down beneath the Jagged Straits. I was the only survivor too, mind. Maybe you buys me a drink, and I’ll tell ye about it.

This? No, this coin’s not for spending, friend. That’s my lucky Kraken, for to pay the Tithe.

The Tithe. Ye know the Tithe. Everyone knows about the Tithe. “Pay the Tithe, or face the ocean’s wrath.”

Oh, by the Bearded Lady... Then you never heard o’ Nautilus, either? The Titan of the Depths?

Barkeep! Pour us a round, barkeep, there’s a good lass. This is a tale that needs an ale, as they say... and my friend here’s buyin’.

Ahh, that’s the good stuff, that is.

‘Twas almost thirty years back, now, returning from a hunt. I was a harpooner, finest shot in the Slaughter Fleets. We’d caught ourselves an axe-fin leviathanaye, one o’ them big, mean boggersand we was haulin’ the beast back to port. It were just before dawn. Bilgewater’s city lights flickered in the distance, beckonin’ us in. There were razorfish and berserker sharks following close by, ‘cos the axe-fin was oozing into the water, see.

And our captain... Well, none of us much cared for him. Untrustworthy sort. He swears blind he paid the Tithe ‘afore we left. “A single gold Kraken,” he said, “for ‘tis all I have to give.”

But none of us seen him throw it over the side, now did we. So, naturally we was suspicious, ‘cos we knew he was a tight-fisted old wharf rat. But on we sailed anyway.

And that was when the Titan hit us.

Without warning, this bloody great anchor comes at us from below. Smashed clean through the keel, up through the main deck. Caught us tight, and started pullin’ us down... Oh, it was chaos, friend. Sailors thrown overboard. The waters churnin’, scavengers feedin’. I grabs the captain, screamin’ at him, “You’re a liar! This is the Lady’s punishment for those as don’t pay!”

The ship was going down fast. But then the planking gave way, didn’ it, and the anchor slid back into the depths. If it had ended then, more of us might’ve got away.

But it weren’t over. Nautilus weren’t done wi’ us yet.

The ship tipped to starboard, right-sudden. It was the weight of the Titan himself, hauling up onto the deck. Perhaps once it’d been a man, but it weren’t no man I saw that night, risin’ from the waves. I has our captain by the throat. “This is your doing!” I roared, as I chokes the bastard, his eyes wide. He can see Nautilus is comin’ for us...

So I shoves the captain away, down the slanted deck, and this thing catches him in one hand, if you can believe it! It was so big, the fingers closed completely around ‘is bodyand the captain weren’t a small man by any stretch.

“There’s your Tithe!” I yells, and jumped overboard.

I dunno how long I was in the water. Must’ve only been seconds, but it felt like an age. But the sea scavengers didn’t get me, Mother Serpent be praised. Pulled myself up onto one of them stone pinnacles, out there in the Straits, an’ I watched the Ophidian sink.

Nautilus still held the captain, squirmin’ and wrigglin’ like a stuck worm, but there were no escapin’ that grasp. The Titan was just standing there, motionless as a statue. I watched them go down, down into the darkness.

Why spare me? Don’t rightly know. Perhaps I was the only one to make an offering. Or maybe Nautilus wanted someone left alive, to tell the tale. But on the darkest Bilgewater nights, when the murder-fogs roll in, ye might hear ‘im wading out from the shallows, slow and steady like, draggin’ that accursed anchor in his wake...

Want my advice, friend? Keep a coin in your pocket, and always pay the Tithe. And don’t trust no captain who says he’s done it, ‘less you seen it for yourself.

After all, ye might not be so lucky as me.

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.”