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All eyes in Fortune's Glory were on Twisted Fate. He felt the gambling hall's many patrons regarding him with a mixture of envy, vicarious excitement, and spiteful longing for him to lose everything on the turn of the last card.

Beyond the avarice common to dens of chance, Twisted Fate felt a singular purpose at work here, a noose being slowly drawn around his neck. The cards were twitching in agitation, warning him of danger. He knew he should fold and get out before whoever was hunting him sprang their trap, but the opportunity to make a pauper of the man across the table was too enticing to forego.

He grinned at his opponent, a greedy merchant whose fortune was built on the whipped backs of enslaved miners. The man's robes were expensive: Freljord furs, hand-tooled leather, and Bilgewater sea charms. Every finger boasted a ring of blood gold worth more than most men would see in a lifetime. Aromatic smoke drifted from clay pipes to hang over the fortune in coin, jewelry, and deeds lying between them like a pirate's treasure horde.

Twisted Fate nodded toward the merchant.

“I do believe it's your call, Master Henmar.”

“I am aware of the rules, river rat,” said Henmar, as Twisted Fate ran his tattooed fingers in a repeating spiral pattern on the backs of his cards. “And do not think any of your fancy sleight of hand is going to distract me into making an error of judgment.”

“Distract you?” said Twisted Fate, exuding laconic confidence in every gesture. “I declare, I would never stoop to such a low and dishonorable ruse.”

“No? Then why is it your eyes keep darting from the table?” said Henmar. “Listen closely, I have negotiated with the best of them, and I know the tell of a desperate man when I see it.”

Twisted Fate gave a sly grin, swapping the cards between his hands and theatrically doffing his wide-brimmed hat.

“You're sharp, sir. I can see that,” he said, sweeping his gaze across the gathered crowd. The usual collection of hangers-on; men and women hoping that whoever won might be generous to those nearby. The cards trembled as Twisted Fate's eyes fell upon certain individuals and he felt his mouth fill with the rancid flavor of sour milk. He’d long learned to trust that reaction as a sign of imminent bedlam.

There. A man with an eye patch and a flame-haired woman. They were almost certainly armed and well aware of his slippery nature. Did he know them? Probably not. Were they working for Henmar, protecting his assets? Unlikely. A man like Henmar would make it obvious who he'd brought. Bounty hunters then. The cards were growing ever more alarmed in Twisted Fate's hands. He slipped them together and placed them flat on the table.

“You have a look that tells me you know you have already lost,” said Henmar with the tone of a man who believes everyone to be his inferior.

“Then what say we make this a little more interesting, sir?” replied Twisted Fate, spreading the cards in a fan and watching as the hunters eased closer. “Care to double down?”

“Are you able to cover that much?” asked Henmar suspiciously.

“Easily,” said Twisted Fate, locking his gaze with the merchant and lifting a heavy pouch of coins from the voluminous pockets of his long coat. “Can you?”

Henmar licked his lips and snapped his fingers. A flunky behind the merchant handed him a matching bag of coins. The patrons of Fortune's Glory gave a collective moan as it was added to the gold heaped in the middle of the table. Wars had been waged for less coin than was at stake here.

“You first,” said Henmar.

“Always,” agreed Twisted Fate, flipping over his cards as the bounty hunters made their move.

The man with the eye patch lunged at him with a capture collar. The woman shouted his name and drew a matching pair of pistols.

Twisted Fate kicked the underside of the table, spinning it into the air in a shower of coins, cards, and parchment. The pistols fired with deafening roars, blasting fist-sized holes in the table. The capture collar snapped closed, but when the smoke cleared and the screams stopped, Twisted Fate was nowhere to be found.

Henmar rose to his feet, his face twisted in outrage as he searched in vain for his opponent. He looked down at the broken pieces of the table and the color drained from his face.

“Where is the money?” he yelled. “Where is my money?”

Five cards fluttered face-up to the floor of Fortune's Glory.

A winning hand.

The fire was crackling away nicely, spreading a warm glow throughout the forest clearing. Tristana lay on her back with her head pillowed on her pack, watching a comet streak across the starlit sky. The winking lights glittered prettily through a swaying canopy of birch and oak leaves. The humans liked to name the patterns in the stars – she’d seen some in an old book in Heimerdinger’s laboratory – but she decided it would be more fun to give them names of her own invention.

“You can be the Growling Badger,” she said, pointing to one group of stars. “And you can be the Cheeky Changeling. Yes, that’s much better than boring names like The Warrior or The Defender. And anyway, I can’t see those ones anymore.”

Her stomach rumbled and she sat up. Hunger was still something surprising to her, even though she’d ventured beyond Bandle City more than most of her kind. A pair of spitted fish were roasting nicely over the flames and the smell of them was making her mouth water. She’d shot them in the stream to the west of her campsite with a single, exceptionally carefully-aimed bullet from her cannon. Not a bad feat of marksmanship, even if she did say so herself. Too bad no-one was around to see it! She leaned over and patted the polished drakewood stock of her exquisitely crafted cannon; a weapon any sensible observer would say was far too large for someone of her diminutive stature to even carry, let alone shoot.

“Let Teemo have his cute little blowpipes, eh, Boomer?” she told the cannon. “I’ll stick to something with a bit more oomph, thank you very much.”

The fire crackled in a ring of stones, burning with cerulean flames, thanks to the pinch of her custom powder she’d sprinkled on the kindling to get it started. She knew now just how little she needed to use after her first time in the Upplands had cost her a perfectly decent pair of eyebrows. Sometimes it was hard to remember that things were so different in the human world compared to back home.

Deciding the fish were ready, she slid one from the spit onto a wooden plate she removed from her pack. She unwrapped a golden knife and fork from a rolled dreamleaf and cut the fish into slices. She might be on a mission, but that didn’t mean she had to eat like a savage. She took a mouthful of fish and rolled it around her mouth, savoring the taste and licking her lips in satisfaction. Mortal food was usually bland and tasteless compared to the smorgasbord of flavors she was used to, but the fish in this part of the world – Ionia, she’d heard it was called – wasn’t half bad. Perhaps it was the magic saturating every element of this landscape that made them extra tasty.

Tristana heard the crack of a twig. One of many she’d laid in a circle around her camp. The sound and type of twig told her exactly how far away the humans were and from which direction they were approaching.

She cleared her throat and called out, “I have another fish if you’re hungry.”

A man and a woman emerged from the forest in front of her. Both were tall and lean, with fidgeting hands and cold eyes. They didn’t look friendly, but she was still learning how to read human expressions and she’d been taught to always be polite. Human languages were so unsophisticated that she often wondered how they managed to communicate at all.

The man took a step forward and said, “Many thanks, old one, but we are not hungry.”

“Old one?” said Tristana with a playfully indignant grin. “I’m a young slip of a girl!”

The man blinked and she saw what might have been a look of puzzlement cross his face.

“The old crone’s insane,” said the woman, looking sidelong at her, as if not quite sure what to make of what she was seeing. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t her true form…

“You’re sure you don’t want a bit of fish?” asked Tristana, taking another bite. “It’s really tasty.”

“We’re sure,” confirmed the man. “But we’ll take any coin you’re carrying. As well as that gun of yours. I suspect it will fetch a pretty penny at auction.”

“You want to steal my Boomer?” said Tristana, sensing movement to either side. “You know, I just don’t see that happening.”

“No? You’re alone and there’s two of us,” said the man. “And we’re bigger than you.”

“Size isn’t everything,” said Tristana. “And there’s four of you. Why don’t you ask your two bandit friends to come out? Maybe they’re hungry?”

The woman shook her head. “He told you, we’re alone.”

“Oh, come on,” said Tristana. “What sort of commando do you think I’d be if I didn’t know you had two friends in the bushes with arrows aimed at me right now? You came in from the north and split up a hundred yards out. There’s a fat man to my left and a man with a limp to my right.”

“Good ears for one so old,” said the man.

“I told you, I’m not old,” said Tristana. “I’m actually pretty young for a Yordle.”

The man’s mouth dropped open in surprise as something of her true nature became apparent to him.

Finally! An expression she had no trouble in reading.

Tristana ducked and rolled to the side as a pair of black-fletched arrows slashed from the undergrowth. They passed harmlessly overhead as she swept up Boomer and chambered a round. She fired into the bushes to her right and was rewarded with a cry of pain.

“Blast off!” she cried, vaulting toward the nearest tree and bounding higher. Tristana landed on a branch halfway up its trunk. Another arrow flashed toward her, thudding into the bark a handspan from her head.

“Hey, you’re pretty fast for a human,” she said, racking Boomer’s crank and priming the barrel with a bunch of shells. She sprang away to another branch as the archer rose from the bushes – the fat one, which almost made it too easy. Tristana somersaulted from tree to tree and fired twice more. Both shots caught the man in his meaty thighs, and he fell back with a wail, loosing his arrow high into the air.

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” she laughed. “I barely grazed you!”

Tristana landed by her fire as the two humans she’d first seen rushed her with drawn swords. They were likely fast by human standards, but to her they moved like lumbering giants.

“Time for some up and over!” shouted Tristana, unloading the rest of Boomer’s barrel in one almighty blast into the ground. She gave a wild, whooping yell as she sailed over their heads. Even as she arced through the air she was reloading. She pushed off from the trunk of a tree and spun back to the ground.

She landed right behind the bandits with a giggle.

“Boom! Boom!”

Tristana fired two blasts, and both humans cried out in pain as they each took a wound to the rump. The woman fell flat on her face, beating her britches as powder burn set them alight. She managed to pick herself up and flee into the bushes with her backside on fire. The man twisted as he dropped to the ground, scrambling away as she cranked Boomer’s loading arm.

He was making hand gestures he probably thought were some form of magical protection.

“You’re no old woman,” he said.

“I kept telling you that,” said Tristana.

The man opened his mouth to answer, but before he could speak the arrow loosed from the fat man’s bow finally came back down to earth. It thudded into the man’s chest and he fell back with a look of intense annoyance.

The other bandits were dragging themselves away as fast as their wounded limbs would carry them. She let them go, grinning as she gathered up her things before stamping down the fire.

“I was just trying to eat my dinner and have a quiet night,” she said to herself. “But I guess four bandits who won’t trouble anyone again soon isn’t bad going!”

Tristana slung Boomer over her shoulder and set off once more, whistling a jaunty tune as she looked for more stars to name.

Raised in the wharf alleys of Bilgewater, Malcolm Graves quickly learned how to fight and how to steal, skills that would serve him very well in all the years ahead. He could always find work hauling contraband up from the smugglers’ skiffs that came into the bay each night—with a tidy side-gig as hired muscle for various other unsavory local characters, as they went about their business in the port.

But the alleys were small-time, and he craved more excitement than they could offer. Still little more than a youth, Graves stole a blunderbuss and smuggled himself aboard a ship headed out of Bilgewater to the Shuriman mainland, where he stole, lied, and gambled his way from place to place along the coast.

Across the table of a high-stakes—and highly illegal—card game in Mudtown, Graves met a man who would change the course of his life, and his career: the trickster now known to many as Twisted Fate.

Each immediately saw in the other the same reckless passion for danger and adventure, and together they formed a most lucrative partnership. Between Graves’ raw brawn and Twisted Fate’s ability to talk his way out of (and occasionally back into) almost any situation, they were an unusually effective team from the outset. Their mutual sense of roguish honor grew into genuine trust, and together they stole from the rich, swindled the foolish, handpicked skilled crews for specific jobs, and sold out their rivals whenever they could.

Though at times Twisted Fate would blow all their shares and leave them with nothing to show for it, Graves knew that the thrill of some new escapade was always just around the corner…

On the southern borderlands of Valoran, they set two renowned noble houses of Noxus at each other’s throats as cover for the rescue of a kidnapped heir. That they pocketed the reward money, only to ransom the vile young man to the highest bidder, should really have come as no surprise to their original employer. In Piltover, they still hold the distinction of being the only thieves ever to crack the supposedly impenetrable Clockwork Vault. Not only did the pair empty the vault of all its treasures, they also tricked the guards into loading the loot onto their hijacked schooner, for a quick getaway through the Sun Gates.

In almost every case, only once they and their accomplices were safely over the horizon were their crimes even discovered—usually along with one of Twisted Fate’s trademark calling cards left where it would be easily found.

But, eventually, their luck ran out.

During a heist that rapidly turned from complex to completely botched, Graves was taken by the local enforcers, while Twisted Fate merely turned tail and abandoned him.

Thrown into the infamous prison known as the Locker, Graves endured years of torture and solitary confinement, during which time he nursed his bitter anger toward his old partner. A lesser man would surely have been broken by all this, but not Malcolm Graves. He was determined to have his revenge.

When he finally clawed his way to freedom, with the prison warden’s brand new shotgun slung over his shoulder, Graves began his long-overdue pursuit of Twisted Fate.

The search led him back home to Bilgewater, where he found that the wily old cardsharp had acquired a few new bounties on his head—and Graves would be only too happy to claim them. However, just as he got Twisted Fate in his sights, they were forced to put aside their differences in order to escape almost certain death in the ongoing conflict between the reaver king Gangplank and his rival ship captains.

Once again, Graves found himself escaping his hometown… only this time, he had his old friend in tow. While both of them might have liked to pick up their partnership where they left off all those years ago, such resentment couldn't simply be forgotten overnight, and it would be a while before Graves could bring himself to trust Twisted Fate again.

Still, he feels Bilgewater calling to him once more. Maybe this time around, the pair of them will find their stride and be able to pull off the ultimate heist…

There existed, among the multitude of disgusting Bilgewater shipping warehouses filled with rusted knives and arms-length carnivorous rats, one Bilgewater shipping warehouse devoid of such things. Owned by a Piltovan arms dealer whose relative was recently murdered (and skinned and stuffed into a dockside horror house), it was primarily used to ship large quantities of high explosives—both powder and hex—to various enemies of peace across the continent. Most notably, the Noxians in Ionia, the Noxians in Shurima, the Noxians in Demacia, and, very occasionally, the Noxians in Noxus—the latter having recently sent a letter threatening to murder “the cheap bastard who was gouging them with their bomb prices.”

Said Piltovan owner-slash-bastard, deciding it was no longer safe to be the consigliere of colonial evil, therefore employed a group of heavily armed Azure Way mercenaries to guard his warehouse while simultaneously hiring a different group of heavily armed mercenaries to steal the entire hoard from under the first group’s noses. A great sum of coin was spent insuring this hoard so that in the event of a colossal chain explosion during a violent, hypothetical gunfight, the owner would walk away an ever-so-slightly wealthier arms dealer. A forward-thinking business decision, considering his heist crew consisted of notorious con artist Twisted Fate, and notorious bath-avoider Malcolm Graves.

Collateral damage was intended.

“What the blue hells is this? Some kinda setup?” Malcolm Graves correctly guessed from behind a second-floor catwalk, his large, meaty body only barely concealed by a double-wide pillar. Gunfire rained upward all around him, chewing away thick pieces of his cover and punching holes into nearby shipping containers—many of which displayed prominent illustrations of a frowning cartoon man being blown apart.

“Seems that way,” Twisted Fate replied, crouched nearby as he flipped a playing card over in his fingers. With each turn, its hues shifted from blue, to red, to gold—though when he got especially nervous, he couldn’t get the order right. This was a problem, considering the red ones caused large flaming explosions, the gold ones caused large glittering explosions, and the blue ones were not really that useful right now.

“Why aren’t you doing anything, ya jackass? I can’t even take a shot!” yelled Graves, his finger twitching over the trigger of his human-sized shotgun. He didn’t mind being shot at as long as he could return the favor.

“They’re set up behind a crate of gunpowder,” Fate snapped back, motioning around the room that was stacked floor to ceiling with volatile dry-pack explosives. “Unless you want to go down like the Dead Pool, we might need to figure out a plan B.”

“I don’t wanna do that!” whinged Graves, not specifying whether he meant dying or thinking. “This sucks! Why do we always gotta pick the weird jobs?”

“Because they pay the best,” replied Fate, perhaps more nonchalantly than the moment called for. “Ain’t a reflection on us.”

“Huh. Makes sense when you say it like that.” Graves pondered their predicament, wondering if his smoke bombs would cause the pair to immediately die by igniting some stray black powder on the warehouse floor, or if they’d die half a second later when one of the blinded fish-men accidentally fired his gun into a crate of dynamite. The second option sounded good. Really good. Really, really good.

“I’ve got a really, really, really good plan!” Graves announced, confidently holding out a live grenade. He glanced at the tiny frowning cartoon man on the boxes in front of him. “Don’t judge me,” he told him.

“What are you doin’?” Fate protested, his eyes widening in horror as Graves’ arm arced back for the throw. In his mind, he saw the two of them disintegrating along with a good portion of the Slaughter Docks—or at least Graves disintegrating, which would be inconvenient at best. “Malcolm, what are you doin’?”

“Wait!” boomed a voice from below. “Do not throw that!”

Graves, somewhat disheartened by the order, but equally grateful the gunfire had suddenly ebbed, lowered his smoke bomb. Fate, who in a state of panic had forgotten the color of the card he held, gripped a red one, which would have accidentally killed everyone if he’d mistakenly activated it to try and escape the warehouse.

The partners locked eyes for a moment, looked at their respective explosives, then back at each other.

“Mine was better,” gloated Graves. “Safer.”

The voice from below, now near hysterical, busied itself commanding the other mercenaries to stop firing wildly into a warehouse stuffed with bombs, specifically lambasting someone named Kouign who “should know better after last time.” The gunmen grumbled in turn. Or burbled, or blubbed, depending on the size and configuration of their prominently fishy heads.

As the unseen voice in charge moved about, Fate leaned over to Graves, pointing at his interior coat pocket. “You still got that blue card I gave you?” he whispered.

“What, the one from the Sentinels? Yeah, I still got it,” Graves answered at a normal volume.

“Quiet. Now what say we pop that sucker and get out of here? These guys are distracted. They’ll never know we left.”

“Nuh-uh, you already told me what all this is worth. You think I’m just gonna leave a score that big on the table? I got a mouth to feed: mine.”

“We shoulda died at least a hundred times already. Now’s the chance to cut our losses.”

“I’ll never die, because I’m the handsome protagonist. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone knows squat. One stray bullet, and we’re all portraits at a funeral.”

“Your funeral, maybe. I beat Viego. That makes me the male lead.”

“The male lead? I am so tired of this damn story!” yelled Fate, immediately attracting the attention of everybody in the room.

“See? That’s your fault. Real deuteragonist behavior,” Graves gloated, about forty percent sure he used the word “deuteragonist” right.

Everyone collectively hesitated, each glancing around nervously as the realization of where they were and what, exactly, they had gotten themselves into began to sink in. Yet neither the pair of bumblers nor the rank and file Azure Way castoffs had the authority to end this standoff... Or really any standoff, as immediate and violent escalation is a rich Bilgewater tradition.

The tall hammerhead-shark man with a menacing harpoon gun and no shirt was also unable to end this standoff, but he did not know it yet. His name was Bombolini, and the two things he knew best were how to project an understated elegance for a creature of his stature, and how to know exactly what to say to command a room.

“What are you doing, you buncha ding dongs?” he shouted toward the catwalk. “You tryna vaporize half of Bilgewater? What kind of heist crew brings live ammunition to a powder job?”

Malcolm Graves and Twisted Fate both (unwisely) poked their heads out from their cover, each looking into a different monocular eye of their newfound opponent. His steely gaze, his muscular figure, his mean-looking weapon that was clearly intended to skewer sea serpents. A second of recognition passed. Two seconds. And then, for some reason, three.

“Bombolini?” Graves asked.

“Malcolm?” Bombolini asked back. “Malcolm Graves? Is that you? Are... Are you robbing me?”

Graves let out a sigh of relief, relaxing his shoulders. This wasn’t just any dumb fish. This was a dumb fish friend.

“I’m not robbing you. I’m robbing the guy who hired you,” Graves explained. “I think he hired us, too. Which makes what we’re doin’ up here morally sound.”

“Us?”

“Hey, Bombolini,” Fate waved. “I’m robbing you, too.”

“Wha—” protested Bombolini. “Now wait a damn minute! You two blew me up! You blew me up on my own ship! We were partners, and you double-crossed me for the worst score this city has ever seen!”

“It wasn’t the worst,” retorted Graves.

“One jewel,” Fate corrected. “Ended up being glass.”

“Nah, that’s not right,” Graves said. “Had to be more.”

But it wasn’t.

Many years prior, Bombolini had been the unappreciated third member of the Graves & Fate crime duo back when they pulled small jobs for bad pay, and their posters were somewhat... unfortunately worded.

“Two men who will do anything (and we mean anything) to anybody (and we mean anybody) for the right price (any price),” the leaflets used to say, which, in addition to Bombolini’s complete erasure from the group, led to a number of rather avoidable miscommunications with prospective clientele. And thanks to Bilgewater’s rich tradition of violent escalation, these mishaps tended to end in bloodshed or minor dock explosions—ironically drawing enough attention to the upstart criminals that they became a popular mercenary outfit.

The leaflets remained unchanged for years, which made a young Bombolini deeply bitter. He eventually used his portion of the group’s earnings to buy a modest schooner, retire from criminality, and start a solo wreck-diving operation in the Blue Flame Isles that paid much better than robbery and coincidentally did not bill itself as some sort of pirate flesh carnival in bar flyers.

Also coincidentally, success tends to draw eyes, and two of those eyes eventually hired Malcolm Graves and Twisted Fate to rob their former companion at a dive site near a Buhru ruin. Lacking any moral fiber whatsoever, the pair immediately accepted. The robbery instantly led to a small oil fire, then a large oil fire, then bloodshed followed by a minor schooner explosion. All the treasure sank with the ship... save, of course, for a single piece of sea glass.

Bombolini was assumed dead, the client was furious, and nobody got paid. All in all, it was one of the duo’s more successful heists.

“Didn’t you die?” asked Fate. “I’m pretty sure you died.”

Bombolini tilted his head, unable to see any part of himself thanks to the wide setting of his predatory eyes—though the attempt was quite valiant. “Does it look like I’m dead?”

“I dunno,” replied Graves. “Maybe.”

“Are we going to kill them, boss?” asked a fishman impatiently, this one a spotter resembling a large, bipedal goby.

“I second Goby,” said his partner, a hunched-over humanoid pistol shrimp with a rather impressive long gun. “You said these guys double-crossed you before, right? What’s their deal?”

Bombolini blinked, his walnut-sized brain chugging along as he attempted to remember what exactly their deal had been. After a few decades, one tends to forget the intricacies of their archnemeses.

Graves. Fate. Graves... but also... Fate. What is their deal?

Eureka.

He had arrived at something interesting. Something he could use. Something that would turn the entire confrontation on its head.

“They’re together,” he guessed confidently.

A pause.

“We know that,” replied Goby.

“No, they’re together,” Bombolini repeated, even more confidently. “I knew they’d end up with each other. Graves always had the worst taste in men, and Fate is the worst man I’ve ever met. It all makes sense!”

Goby shrugged. Shrimp sighed and turned back toward the pair of thieves above, adjusting the sight on his gun as he wondered why, exactly, he’d agreed to any of this in the first place.

Up on the catwalk, however, the mood was decidedly different.

“He thinks we’re together,” whispered Fate. “Like, together-together. A couple. Romantically.”

“I know what ‘together’ means, Tobias,” Graves whispered back, now decidedly more discreet than before. “But how do we use it? What’s the play? And why was he so mean?”

Fate stroked his chin with his free hand, flipping the errant red card into a gold card as he turned the question over in his head. The chance of everyone dying in a colossal fireball was still higher than he liked, but with Bombolini and his men off guard, now was the time for bold action. He needed something big. Something dumb. Something that would turn the entire confrontation on its head. He needed...

“I cannot believe you got us into this mess again!” Fate shouted, pointing an accusatory finger at Graves while making sure most of his body remained hidden from the sniper. “This is just like you, never thinking before you show up! You’re too big, you have no finesse, and you packed hex-shots and grenades for a powder job! My ma was right, we shouldn’t have stayed together!”

Graves was taken aback for several reasons. The first of which is that he had never met Fate’s mother, and, up until this point, had not been sure she even existed. The second was that Fate had not explained the plan to him and was now making jabs at Graves’ rugged burliness and masterful heist preparation—both of which made him a statuesque prince among thieves.

“Hey, what are you sayin’? You’re the one always goin’ on about how you’re so clever, and yet here we are, pullin’ another garbage job where you’re gonna die and I gotta save you! If it were up to me, we’d be doin’ easy jobs, like individual murders and light-to-heavy extortion!”

“Yeah, because you have no vision!” Fate continued, emphasizing the word “vision” while winking prominently.

Graves did not register this right away, and continued to bluster about his partner’s many shortcomings.

“That’s why we always fight,” Fate winked again. This one broke through.

Down below, Bombolini was ecstatic among an otherwise bored or confused crew.

When one is double-crossed by an old friend, their emotional chemistry is irreversibly altered. It makes them paranoid, delusional, and most importantly, occasionally taken with intricate revenge fantasies.

Bombolini embodied all of this. He often liked to entertain one of these fantasies wherein his two most hated enemies had an immediate falling out in front of his steely shark eyes. This falling out would take place in some sort of room or vessel with a heavy explosive payload that would, at the apex of the argument, burst into flames and detonate, killing them both as the smoke spelled out “We’re sorry, Bombolini.” Then everyone would cheer, and he would be given a crown and a sash. Possibly a scepter.

It was a very intricate fantasy.

What was not part of the fantasy was being hit squarely in the chest by a well-aimed gold card and flying out of the shipping door into the sea.

“Now!” said Fate, dashing out from his cover and into an adjoining office as he splashed the bare walls with gold cards wherever the explosives weren’t stacked high enough to ignite. Each card burst with a dazzling spray of golden filament, temporarily stunning Bombolini’s mercenaries who then immediately began firing in all directions.

As Graves followed Fate through the suite and into the guts of the larger warehouse, a stray bullet buried itself in the crate Goby and Shrimp were using for cover, and the two fish-men froze. With bullets whizzing through the air, Goby looked at Shrimp, and Shrimp looked at Goby. What felt like an eternity passed between them.

“I think we’re sa—” said Goby, exploding.

The first blast rocked the entire structure as Fate and Graves stumbled along a flimsy metal suspension bridge over far more crates of black powder than their client had originally described.

“That’s not good,” said Fate with a glance below.

“It really isn’t,” replied Graves. “I know we was doing a bit, but on a personal and professional level, I am not happy with you right now.”

“You’re never happy with me, anyway! We gotta move!” exclaimed Fate as several armed mercenaries looked up from the gloom, suddenly noticing the two distinctly non-fishlike criminals above them.

Graves, now more emotionally wounded than he wanted to let on, tossed a smoke grenade over the side of the catwalk, enveloping the first floor in a thick cloud of caustic fog. “That’s usually fun, but my heart’s just not in it right now,” he explained over the sound of dry-heaving mercenaries.

“Why are you being such a big baby? You’re a grown man!” shouted Fate, attempting to move the action along as stray shots rang out across the powder storage floor.

“Stop calling me a big baby! You’re always taking shots at my size. I’m the muscle that saves the day every time you get your goose cooked. You’re ungrateful as hell, Fate!”

“I’m ungrateful? I’m not the one who disappeared for months to go fight some Camavor ghost prince, then rolled back into town one night like he owned the place.”

“He was a ghost king, and you’re lucky I fought him or we’d all be ghosts! You’d be a ghost, I’d be a ghost. Everyone would be a ghost!”

“You weren’t even there! You think I don’t read Shauna’s letters? Graves, I’m a con man, you can’t trick me. They left you outside while scissors doll and the shirtless wonder saved the day.”

“That ain’t how it went down, Fate,” said Graves darkly. “That’s just the story. We don’t talk about what really happened.”

“Oh, please! Your delusions of grandeur were annoying decades before you became Valoran’s number-one hero.”

“Is this still a fake fight or are we having a real fight? Because if it’s a real fight, I will punch that stupid hat through your mouth.”

“I think it’s a real fight! And you know what else? You do stink, and you don’t think things through, and live grenades were not the best call here!”

“Yeah, well, this is why we stopped working together the first damn time! Because you think you’re better than me, and you think you’re better than this!”

“And what if I am?” yelled Fate, only realizing what he’d said after he had said it.

From the burning, rupturing front of the warehouse, Bombolini’s surviving mercenaries poured through the service door and onto the catwalk, its bolts decoupling from the walls under their combined weight. Many of the gunmen were badly singed and filled with a roiling anger fit to match their newfound crispiness.

“We can fight later, dammit! Get yer behind out that door!” Graves commanded as he and Fate dropped their argument and made a run for the exit with a rapidly sinking catwalk buckling underfoot.

Six strides from the doorway, another blast tore upward from the powder floor, consuming the Azure Way mercenaries in a pillar of raging flame as the crates beneath them began to blow one by one. The smoke from Graves’ grenade, a highly flammable mix of stinging, blinding, and stinking components deployed for tactical measures, immediately caught fire—something Graves did not account for, despite his supplier telling him several dozen times that the smoke was flammable. This, of course, ignited and exploded even more crates of black powder, launching both the slick card-sharp and the daring bath-avoider through a crumbling brick wall, down one floor, and into a grimy foyer—also filled wall-to-wall with explosives.

Among their heists, it still counted as one of the more successful ones.

“Ugh,” groaned Graves. “That sucked.”

Fate fumbled above his head to make sure his hat was still there, and only when he confirmed its safety did he hold his screaming ribs. “Yeah, it did.”

“Tobias, if we don’t make it out of this... I just wanna say one thing.”

“What is it, friend?” smiled Fate.

“I hope you die first,” Graves cough-laughed.

“Aw, shucks, that’s sweet.”

The warehouse shook again as debris and chunks of roof smacked hard against the floor, smoke poured through the gaping second-story hole in the wall, and flames licked tightly packed boxes of hexplosives—these emblazoned with a different frowning cartoon man in the process of blowing up.

“Did no one notice how wildly unsafe this was?” asked Graves, hobbling toward what appeared to be a service exit.

“It’s Bilgewater, Malcolm. Nobody notices anything.”

“Nobody... except for me!” said a familiar, if slightly raspier, voice.

Bombolini, now sporting a thick purple bruise in the center of his torso, stepped theatrically before the duo, his harpoon gun primed as his large, sharky shape stood between Bilgewater’s most-noticed mercenaries and the only way out. Graves caught sight of a damp, shark-shaped spot on the dock outside. Bombolini had likely been hiding there, waiting minutes for this reveal.

“Gods, not this donut again,” Fate muttered.

“And yet, it is!” Bombolini exclaimed, stifling a cough. “Do you know what I thought when I saw you two after all these years? After all that time, all that—”

“Not interested,” said Graves, pointing his massive shotgun at a container of explosives directly next to the shark-man. Graves pulled the trigger, the gun fired, and everything went up in smoke.

Several hundred arm spans from the rupturing warehouse once filled with far too many explosives to actually steal, Malcolm Graves and Twisted Fate suddenly appeared in the air a length and a half above a quaint little fishing pier... along with some residual smoke and flame, as Fate’s teleportation timing had not been perfect. The two crashed onto the ground with Graves’ gun landing squarely on his stomach. The sound he made was a bit like “uhbloof,” though it could have been any number of other expletives.

“Those blue cards sure are useful,” Fate bragged from flat on his newly injured back, dusting off his hat with the arm that wasn’t cradling his possibly broken ribs. It had been a long day.

“Yeah, but they’re never useful in the beginning,” wheezed Graves, a little toasty and bruised, but otherwise none the worse for wear. “We should use them before a gunfight breaks out. For stealing and whatnot.”

“That takes the artistry out of it. You don’t build a name for yourself by sticking to the shadows—you have to give the people a show!” Fate replied as the warehouse’s frame sagged in the distance and flames erupted furiously from still-unexploded payloads. He theatrically twirled his hand a bit, as if to underline the point.

“Fair,” said Graves, unconvinced.

The pair sat up in their blackened clothes, watching everything explode and then explode some more. It was almost romantic. If one considered that sort of thing romantic. Which, interestingly enough, they did.

“So, uh... what now?” Fate said, breaking the silence as quickly as possible. “Double-cross our dirty client? Dig a grave for whatever’s left of Bombolini?”

Graves chuckled. “Oh, we’re definitely doing that first thing. Nobody tries to blow me up without me blowing them up. As for Bombolini... I’d bet good money the shark is still out there. He’s like me. Too dumb to explode.”

“My friend, you’re the most brilliant dummy I ever did meet,” smiled Fate. “You’ll never explode. And I mean that sincerely.”

“Damn right,” puffed Graves. “Though, now that we’ve had it out... you and I need to have a conversation.”

“Right,” Fate sighed. He was tired of looking for ways to avoid apologizing, and all the adrenaline made him feel better about breaking his cardinal rule of never doing it for any reason.

He still wouldn’t say the word “sorry,” though. That was a bridge too far.

“Malcolm, I did not mean to imply that I was better than you. When we dissolved the business—”

“Stop, stop, stop,” said Graves, laying his shotgun behind himself as he dangled his legs over the water. “I already hate this. Apology accepted—next round’s on you.”

“Good man,” replied Fate thankfully, gazing across the sea as the sun began to set.

Graves looked over at his partner to add another quip, but noticed, perhaps for the first time, that there was a certain angularity to Tobias’ features that he had thus far failed to appreciate. A strong jaw, a shockingly unbroken nose, a bold choice in semi-fashionable hats. He was an objectively terrible person, but maybe the right kind of terrible for...

Uh-oh, he thought.

Malcolm Graves, now much older, only somewhat wiser, but infinitely more worldly, measured his next words more carefully than most things he did or said on any given day. Which was especially surprising to him, since navigating the complex relationship between two criminal masterminds such as themselves was not really his strong suit, nor had he ever given it much thought. He wondered... Why worry so much about Tobias’ opinion of him? It wasn’t like it mattered. They had their roles, after all, and—

“Malcolm,” Fate interrupted. “Do you have a concussion?”

“It’s possible,” Graves sighed, but not in a sad or tired way. More of a concussed way.

“Alright, let me look,” said the very injured Fate, brushing Graves’ hair aside as he looked for signs of a bruise. “We both know you’re a durable fella, but neither of us is invincible.”

“Not like Bombolini,” said Graves, confused by the welling excitement over Fate playing with his hair.

“I am legitimately dumbfounded by that,” Fate offered. “I remember that boat heist. Our old friend was caught in the middle of a deeply vicious detonation.”

“Deserved it, though. I do not have terrible taste in men. I have good taste in terrible men, and there is absolutely a difference.”

Fate finished inspecting his partner’s head, which didn’t exactly produce any new information, as he didn’t know what a concussion was supposed to look like. He gazed at Graves’ rugged features as the setting sun danced across his boyishly unkempt hair, and then considered all of those words together in a sentence, and then immediately recoiled at the complete thought. “Your taste isn’t terrible, Malcolm. It’s catastrophic.”

“Catastrophic?” Graves fired back. “Name one example. You can’t.”

“The Northman,” Fate said almost instantly. “The trader with the cockroach tattoo. That Buhru cultist—”

“Not a cultist.”

“Tried to sacrifice us both, but sure, not a cultist. The whale guy. The octopus guy. The second whale guy.”

“Orca.”

“An orca is a kind of whale. The monk. The vastaya. The Noxian.”

Graves winced. “Alright, he was bad.”

“A Noxian, Malcolm. From Noxus. People talked about that one.”

“More racist than I would have preferred in a man, in hindsight,” Graves allowed. “But it ain’t like you’re bringing home the greatest lovers in history. You ain’t that slick.”

“Excuse me, I am very slick,” Fate protested. “No matter the size, shape, make, or model, none can resist the charms of Tobias Felix. I have conned hundreds—nay, thousands—of dew-eyed tourists across the whole of this vast and gullible land.”

“Not this one,” laughed Graves, a little too forcefully. “Or, uh... you know.”

“Y... yes, of course, I am aware,” Fate responded, not making eye contact as he fiddled with his hat.

The two sat in silence for a while. Or relative silence, considering the towering flames and brutal detonations and screaming and shouting in the distance.

“Sweet Tommy Kench, look at that sucker burn,” said Graves, still dangling his legs off the pier like the world’s grungiest adult child. “Tobias, I’ve been thinking. And don’t get me wrong, I do love a crime or twenty, and you’ll be there for literally all of them—”

“What about Shauna? Or that lady with the laughing jar?” asked Fate with a tinge of poorly concealed jealousy, despite Graves having been gay for the better part of four decades.

“Vayne,” Graves corrected, more deliberately than was necessary for such a normal and casual conversation between platonic business associates, “is a good friend. But she’ll only help if we’re killing monsters. And for the love of all that’s sacred, never call her ‘Shauna.’ She will break your neck by looking at it. As for the other one... I don’t even want to deal with that right now.”

“She’s scary,” said Fate. “Never seen clothes like that before. So many hands.”

“She’s very scary,” Graves agreed. “I’m afraid she’s gonna kick me through a wall or something.

“Point is, I’m meeting new people. I’m seeing the world. Piltover. The Shadow Isles. I saw Camavor, Tobias. I’m expanding my horizons. I might even want to expand ‘em more. Hear Ixtal’s opening up. Could be good money out there... you know... if you wanted to come along for the ride.”

He rustled through his coat, producing a familiar blue playing card. “In which case, I probably wouldn’t need this anymore. Since you’d be around.”

Fate chuckled. “Why don’t you hold onto that for now? Think of it as... a souvenir.”

Graves grinned, slipping it back into his pocket. “I do like the sound of that.”

The partners smiled foolishly at this, each imagining various swashbuckling criminal misadventures while sitting at an awkward physical distance apart.

“But, you know, as, uh... partners,” Graves specified.

“Yes, obviously. Partners. In crime,” Fate added.

“Nothing else.”

“Nope.”

“Nada.”

“No sir.”

They concluded this exchange with a simultaneous fake cough. Graves looked unblinking at the water, and Fate looked at the underside of his hat. Far off in the distance, the warehouse burned and burned.

It was, all in all, one of their better heists.

Whenever the moon rises into a wintery sky, round and red as blood, the spirit walkers of the Freljord know that another of their kind has been born into the world. One attuned to the wilds and the land, one who walks within and beside the spirit that best matches the shape of their heart. On the night of Udyr’s birth, there was nothing in the crimson moon that suggested anything different than that.

Nothing that would suggest Udyr was already the most powerful walker to ever live.

Every being has spirit, whether person or beast, plant or animal, dead or alive or deathless. But unlike his brethren, Udyr’s power of spiritual connection was not limited to one type of spirit—he could hear them all. The needs and wants of everything around him constantly flooded his mind, making it impossible to hear anything above their roar.

His parents did not know how to help him. Their warmother sent for other spirit walkers to train the boy, but each said the same thing: spirit walker training focused on opening oneself up, not closing oneself off.

The first time Udyr tapped into his powers with purpose was the night the Frostguard came for him. Young Udyr, terrified, hid in the forest. He did not expect to feel the life ripped from... everyone. His entire tribe, slaughtered in an instant. Howling with sadness and rage, Udyr took power from the spirits of the forest. With a swipe of his claws and a beating of his wings, he brought the mountain down on the Frostguard. Alone, grieving, and overwhelmed, Udyr wandered the wastes for years, doing what he had to in order to survive.

He did not interact with humans again until he landed the killing blow on a wildclaw that was troubling a Winter’s Claw hunting party. Impressed, they brought Udyr back to camp. Warmother Hejian sent him to be trained in the ways of war alongside her daughter Kalkia. The wild boy showed the lonely daughter how to live in the wild, and she showed him how to live among people. Soon, the Winter’s Claw began to almost feel like a home.

But that changed when a pack of starved and diseased rimefang wolves skulked close to the camp. Udyr lost himself in the fog of the pack’s madness and hunger, attacking and nearly killing a child. It took Kalkia and her mother’s True Ice to stop Udyr. After the wolves had all been slain, Hejian banished Udyr from the Winter’s Claw.

Udyr returned to the mountains, far from those he could hurt. Kalkia would visit whenever she could get away until she was eventually called upon to lead her tribe. She joyfully lifted Udyr’s banishment, but he refused to return. He still had no control over the spirits whose wants and needs howled inside his mind, but swore he would always be there to protect Kalkia and the people she loved. That was the last time they saw one another.

Everything changed when a foreign monk sought him out, saying he had come to train with the spirit walkers so that he may learn how to subdue the dragon spirit that burned within him. Udyr refused, but the monk challenged Udyr for the right to train with him. They fought to their limits, but in the end, neither won.

The monk introduced himself as Lee Sin, and said that this battle had shown him they both had much to learn. He invited Udyr to train in his homeland of Ionia. With nothing left to tie him to the Freljord, Udyr agreed.

The two men grew close during their journey, taking time each day to spar together and to speak of the spirits, but when they finally arrived at Hirana Monastery, they found it besieged by Noxian invaders. Calling upon the spirits of Ionia, Udyr leapt into the fray.

After their victory, the two men asked the abbott for guidance and how to learn control. The abbott told them that self-mastery had no guaranteed end, but agreed to train them both.

For the first time, Udyr’s mind was quiet enough for him to hear his own thoughts. He and Lee trained together to master the spirits within and beside them. With new knowledge and understanding, Udyr was able to help Lee and his dragon find balance with one another. And through this endeavor, Udyr came to understand that harmony and interdependence created a state of balance in Ionia. In contrast, balance in the Freljord was based on a sense of struggle and conflict—of growth and change—where the fight to survive against an uncaring and dangerous environment lived deep in the soul of every Freljordian.

After several years, Udyr’s powers plateaued. He was faced with the choice to stay and train in Ionia, or return to the struggle of his homeland where he could continue his growth. In the end, the choice was obvious.

Lee gave Udyr one of his blindfolds to keep with him—a reminder of his commitment to self-mastery—and asked for a promise. That, once Udyr had achieved what he was looking for in the Freljord, he would return the blindfold to Lee in person. Udyr wrapped the blindfold around his hand before setting off across the world once again to take up the mantle of spirit walker.

A new conflict between an Avarosan and Winter’s Claw warmother greeted Udyr upon his return to the Freljord. The Avarosan wanted to unite the people of the Freljord under a single banner, putting an end to their struggles. Udyr understood that such an action would harm the spirit of the land, and so he decided to offer counsel to the other side—the Winter’s Claw. It was Kalkia’s headstrong daughter Sejuani who received him, and he could feel her need for guidance.

The young woman accepted Udyr’s help, but Sejuani’s trust was hard-won, for she had grown up hearing tales of the spirit walker and his bloodlust. Udyr came to appreciate Sejuani’s drive and cleverness, though her ruthlessness worried him. Sejuani saw wisdom and a warrior’s heart in Udyr, but his frequent absences grated her nerves. In time, they came to view one another like family—a surrogate oathfather and daughter—though they would never say it aloud.

Before long, the other spirit walkers summoned Udyr down to the south. But fate intervened when he met a strange old woman in an enormous coat. She asked for his help with several impossible tasks that he inevitably failed. Entertained by his attempts, she rewarded his efforts with bread so salty that he choked, and water so cold that his veins turned to ice. The old woman laughed at his reaction and shrugged off her coat, and the spiritual power hit Udyr like an avalanche. He passed out, and woke alone. But he could feel something had changed within him—a new power had awakened. He didn't realize it, but the Seal Sister, in one of her many disguises, had tested Udyr and given him her blessing.

Still unnerved by this odd encounter, Udyr joined his brethren in the south and listened as they told him of a strange spiritual shift they had each felt. They feared the Freljord was dying—the spirits of the land itself crumbling from within. Udyr believed that it was the Avarosans, in their efforts to unite the Freljord, that was causing this pain. He told the other spirit walkers as much, and asked them to fight against the Avarosan advance alongside the Winter's Claw. Many were skeptical, but others, afraid that Udyr might be right, agreed.

With his new spiritual power flowing within him, Udyr raced back to the Winter’s Claw to help end this existential threat to the Freljord once and for all.

Azir walked the gold-paved Emperor’s Way. The immense statues of Shurima’s earliest rulers – his ancestors – watched his progress.

The soft, shadowy light of predawn seeped through his city. The brightest stars still shone overhead, though they would soon be snuffed out by the rising sun. The night sky was not as Azir remembered it; the stars and the constellations were misaligned. Millennia had passed.

With every step, Azir’s heavy staff of office struck a lonely note, echoing through the capital’s empty streets.

When last he had walked this path, an honor guard of 10,000 elite warriors had marched in his wake, and the cheers of the crowd had shaken the city. It was to have been his moment of glory – yet it had been stolen from him.

Now, it was a city of ghosts. What had become of his people?

With an imperious gesture, Azir commanded the sands beside the roadway to rise, creating living statues. This was a vision of the past, the echoes of Shurima given form.

The sand figures looked forward, heads tilted toward the immense Sun Disc hanging above the Dais of Ascension half a league ahead. It hung there still, declaring the glory and power of Azir’s empire, though no one remained to see it. The daughter of Shurima who awakened him, she who bore his lineage, was gone. He sensed her out in the desert. Blood bound them together.

As Azir walked the Emperor’s Way, the sand-echoes of his people pointed up at the Sun Disc, their joyful expressions turning to horror. Mouths opened wide in silent screams. They turned to run, stumbling and falling. Azir watched this all in despairing silence, bearing witness to the last moments of his people.

They were obliterated by a wave of unseen energy, reduced to dust and cast to the winds. What had gone wrong with his Ascension to unleash this catastrophe?

Azir's focus narrowed. His march became more resolute. He reached the base of the Stairs of Ascension and began to climb, taking them five at a time.

Only his most trusted soldiers, the priesthood, and those of the royal bloodline were allowed to step foot upon the Stairs. Sand versions of these most favored subjects lined his path, faces upturned, grimacing and wailing in silence before they too were swept away by the winds.

He ran, taking the steps faster than any man could, talons digging into the stonework, carving furrows where they caught. Sand figures rose, and were then destroyed, to either side of him as he climbed.

He reached the top. Here, he saw the final circle of onlookers: his closest aides, his advisers, the high priests. His family.

Azir dropped to his knees. His family was before him, rendered in perfect, heartbreaking detail. His wife, heavy with child. His shy daughter, clutching his wife's hand. His son, standing tall, on the brink of becoming a man.

In horror, Azir saw their expressions change. Though he knew what was to come, he could not look away. His daughter hid her face in the folds of his wife's dress; his son reached for his sword, shouting in defiance. His wife... her eyes widened, sorrow and despair writ within.

The unseen event blasted them to nothingness.

It was too much, but no tears welled in Azir’s eyes. His Ascended form rendered that simple act of grief forever lost to him. With a heavy heart, he pushed himself to his feet. The question remained as to how his bloodline survived, for it most assuredly had.

The final echo awaited.

He advanced, halting one step below the dais, and watched as it all played out before him, reenacted in the sand.

He saw himself, in his mortal form, rise up into the air beneath the Sun Disc, arms wide and back arched. He remembered this moment. The power coursed through him, infusing his being, filling him with its divine strength.

A newcomer formed in the sand. His trusted bondsman, his magus, Xerath.

His friend uttered a silent word. Azir watched himself shatter like glass, exploding into motes of sand.

“Xerath,” breathed Azir.

The traitor’s expression was unknowable, but Azir could see nothing but the face of a murderer.

Where did such hate come from? Azir had never been aware of it.

The sand image of Xerath rose higher into the air as the Sun Disc's energies focused into his being. A cadre of elite guards rushed toward him, but they were all far too late.

A brutal shockwave of sand flared out, disintegrating the final moment of Shurima. Azir stood alone among the dying echoes of his past.

This is what killed his people.

Azir turned away, just as the first rays of the new dawn struck the Sun Disc overhead. He'd seen enough. The sand image of the transformed Xerath collapsed behind him.

The dawn sun reflected blindingly off Azir's flawless golden armor. In that instant, he knew that the traitor still lived. He sensed the magus’s essence in the air that he breathed.

Azir lifted a hand, and an army of his elite warriors rose from the sands at the base of the Stairs of Ascension.

“Xerath,” he said, his voice tinged with rage. “Your crimes will not go unpunished.”

Ah, Bilgewater.

It’s a hateful, stinking cesspit of murder and treachery at the best of times… and damn, it’s good to be home.

My back’s to the open ocean as I row out across Bilgewater Bay, so I’m facing the lights of the port city, shining like fool’s gold in the distance.

We’d been running jobs in Valoran, in the City of Progress and its uglier, downtrodden sister, but things started getting hot. And besides, the Prince reached out to us with this contract, and the money was too good to ignore.

Far too good, really, for what looks to me like a wild-eel chase. There’s gotta be a catch—always is—but as I said, the coin on offer weren’t to be sniffed at.

Still can’t believe we’re back. Last time we were here, things got a little, well, explosive.

Sarah Fortune played us all like a fiddle—me, T.F., Gangplank. No one’d ever taken on that gods-damned psychopath like she did. Blew him and his ship to smithereens, with all Bilgewater watching. And T.F. and I, we got a close-up view. Just dumb luck we survived. Of course I hold a grudge against her, but I have to admit, it was mighty impressive what she pulled off. She’s running the place now, from what I hear. Just a few more captains to bring into line, or see to the bottom of Bilgewater Bay. Only a few left who still reckon they can make a play to claim the unofficial throne themselves. Like our old friend, the Prince…

“Can you at least try to keep your mind on the job? We’re drifting off course.”

I glower at T.F. While I’m working up a sweat, the smug bastard’s sitting back, absently flipping cards through his slippery fingers. He’s far too scrawny to be of use on an oar anyway, but him criticizing me while lounging like a fancy Demacian high lord rubs me the wrong way.

The fact that he’s right—current’s pulled us a couple hundred yards south, meaning I gotta row that extra bit harder to get us where we need to be—just riles me even more.

“Feel free to take over any time you want, m’lord,” I growl.

“Can’t,” he says, as he lays three cards face down on the upturned barrel in front of him. “Busy.”

Scowling, I glance over my shoulder to get my bearings. We’re passing through a forest of sharp rocks, jutting out of the ocean like knife blades. ’Course, it ain’t the ones above the surface that are the problem. Just like always, it’s the blades you can’t see that are the real killers.

They’re called the Widow Makers, and they’ve claimed scores of victims over the years. You can see the remnants of the ships that’ve smashed on ’em: broken masts wedged between rocks, shattered planks circling in eddies, rotted boarding nets strung up on razor-sharp pinnacles.

Most of those wrecks are caused by damned fool captains not wanting to pay a Buhru wave-whisperer to guide ’em into port. Not too clever, that choice.

Thankfully, we ain’t trying to navigate the Widow Makers in anything more than ten feet from bow to stern. The leaky rowboat’s name is Intrepid, and I must admit I’ve grown more than a little fond of her since we met an hour past. She’s not much to look at—a bit rusty around the edges, and she could use a lick of paint—but she hasn’t let us down yet, which is something. And she ain’t complained about my rowing.

T.F. turns over each of the three cards, one by one. He frowns, and shuffles ’em back up in his hands. He’s been doing this since we ghosted off the White Wharf. Something in the cards has got him spooked, but I don’t give it any more thought. Tonight’s little paddle into the harbor ain’t gonna amount to nothin’, but we gotta make a show of giving it a solid try. I’m just damn pleased we got half the gold Krakens up front.

Far as I’m concerned, that’s all we’ll be getting, and that’s fine by me. Easiest coin we’ve ever made.

A splash of seawater from my oars slaps T.F. in the face. He stops shuffling his cards and looks up, glaring. “Do you mind?” he says.

Nope, I don’t mind one bit.

“My bad.” I give him a shrug, and keep on rowing.

He takes off his hat and wipes his cheek. Once done, he gives me another glare and puts it back on. Pulls it down low in front, tryin’ to seem all mysterious. Looks like a damn fool to me.

I try to keep the smirk off my face as I dig one of my oars into the water again. Get him good this time, right in the side of the head. Smack.

“Oh, for Luck’s sake,” he snaps, glowering at me. Sticks one finger in his ear and gives it a good waggle. “You’re doing that on purpose.”

“Can’t help it,” I says. “It’s your own fault, tryin’ to look fancy, with your mighty fine coat and your having a bath once a week. Brings out somethin’ mean in me.”

I get him again, perhaps a little more than I intended to. Soaks him to the skin. Infuriated, he starts to stand up, leveling a finger at me, but that just sets Intrepid rocking wildly. He sits down in a hurry, clinging to the sides of the little rowboat, a hilariously terrified expression on his face. For all his show of fanciness, in that moment all T.F.’s cool just got thrown overboard.

I shake my head, chuckling. Still makes me laugh that he’s one of the river folk, one that lived half his life in Bilgewater, no less, and he still can’t swim.

He’s staring daggers at me, his perfumed and carefully oiled hair now hanging limp and dripping like seaweed. I try not to, but it sets me giggling again.

“You’re an imbecile,” he says.

I row on. After a time, the tolling of Third Bell reaches us, drifting across the harbor from Bilgewater.

“We’re here,” T.F. announces, finally, consulting his cards once more.

I look over my shoulder. A jagged rock big enough to be a small island is looming before us, but it doesn’t look much different from any of the others.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” he replies, sharply. Still annoyed about the water, I guess. “I’ve checked and re-checked. The cards keep telling me this is the one.”

There’s quite a few little tricks T.F. can do with those cards of his. He can use ’em to get in and out of places we’d otherwise never have access to, which is mighty handy when tryin’ to pull off a job. I’ve even seen him hurl a card to make a wagon explode like it was packed with gunpowder. But what he’s been doin’ tonight is proper old-blood river folk stuff. Must say it’s usually pretty accurate.

At T.F.’s direction, I pull Intrepid in close, rowing around to the leeward side of the sheer rock face. The swell rises and falls, threatening to smack us against it, but I keep her steady and drop anchor when T.F. tells me we’re at the right spot.

The rock towers overhead.

“So… How do we get up there?” I ask.

“We don’t,” he says. “The cards tell me the shrine’s inside.”

“I don’t see no cave entrance.”

Then I see T.F.’s grin, and my heart sinks. He points overboard, down into the water.

“You ain’t serious,” I mutter.

Last time we were in Bilgewater, I thought I was gonna drown, chained to a cannon kicked overboard. T.F. saved me, but it was a close thing, and I ain’t too keen to relive the experience.

“’Fraid so, partner,” he says. “Unless you want me going in by my lonesome…”

“So you make off with the loot and claim the rest of those Krakens without me? I don’t think so.”

I ain’t forgotten that this son of a dung-worm has left me high and dry before, running off with the coin and leaving me to face the consequences. Those years locked up ain’t ones I’m getting back.

“I thought you didn’t believe the shrine existed,” says T.F. “If I recall correctly, you described it as a ‘wild-eel chase’, right?”

“Yeah, well, I still think it’s a load of superstitious horse manure, but on the off chance it ain’t, I want my cut.”

He’s the one smirking now, as I start taking off my coat and boots. I make sure my shells and cigars are secured and watertight. Then check and re-check that my big double-barreled shotgun, Destiny—newly forged in Piltover, to my own specifications—is tightly wrapped in oilskins, and strapped snugly across my back. I roll up my sleeves.

“So where’s this tunnel, then?”

I dive in. Hope I ain’t jumping right into a school of frenzied razorfish.

It’s bastard cold and bastard dark, but I kick down, going deeper. Fish and gods-know-what-else dart in front of me, flickering at the edge of my vision.

There. While it’s all dark down here, there’s a patch that’s, well, darker, further below. A tunnel entrance. Guess T.F.’s cards were right. I swim into it, and soon realize the water outside weren’t dark at all, not compared to this. I can’t even see my own hands in front of me. It ain’t too wide, neither—my fingertips scrape the smooth stone on either side with every pull.

Glancing back, I see the little circle of blue marking the tunnel entrance. I reckon I’ve got just enough air to turn around and make for the surface. I go on any further, and I ain’t getting back out that way.

T.F. better be right about this. If I drown down here, I swear, next Harrowing I’ll be back to haunt the bastard.

There’s light up ahead, and I kick off the tunnel floor toward it, thinking I’ve found a way out… but no. It’s just a bastard glowing jellyfish, tentacles drifting like deadly towlines. Ain’t going near that thing.

I swim on, now completely blind. Panic’s slowly rising like a Blood Moon tide. I hit a wall in front, and for a horrible moment I think I’m at a dead end. Instinct kicks in, and I push straight up, searching for air, but all I achieve is smacking my head on the rock above. Hard. The cold numbs the pain, but I reckon there’s blood in the water. Not exactly ideal to be bleeding. Berserker sharks can smell that miles away…

I feel trapped, like a rat in a water-filled barrel. I might drown for real this time.

There’s gotta be a way through. I scrabble around desperately, feeling blindly at the walls. Seems like there’re curving spirals carved in the stone, but that ain’t too interesting right now. The air in my lungs feels like poison, and my strength’s starting to fade when I find the opening.

Kicking through, I suddenly see moonlight overhead. I swim up. Break the surface. Suck in a deep, ragged breath. I’m alive!

Treading water, I take stock of my surroundings. I’m inside a cave, partially open to the sky, with the moon shining down.

I paddle over to a rocky ledge and clamber out. Crabs the size of my head skitter out of my way. They’ve each got one overgrown blue claw, and they’re waving ’em at me like they begrudge my presence here. Well, that’s fine with me. Never liked crabs. Make my skin crawl, they do. Too many legs.

First things first. I unsling Destiny and unwrap her oilskins. In the moonlight I give her a quick inspection, checking the loading mechanism and trigger. Looks good. I load a couple of shells, and suddenly things feel a whole lot brighter. Not much that gives me the fear when I’ve got the good lady Destiny locked and loaded in my hands.

“Took you long enough,” says a voice.

I almost unleash both barrels before I realize it’s just T.F. He’s leaning against a rock, trying to look all detached and suave since he took the easy way in with his cards.

“Damn near shat myself, you stupid bastard,” I growl.

“You’re bleeding,” he says.

I touch my scalp. My hand comes away red. “I’ll live.” Hope I’m right about that.

He might try to play it cool, but T.F.’s still looking at me, and I can tell he’s concerned. I won’t admit it, but I appreciate that.

“Don’t get all excited. I’m fine!” I look around, noting that every inch of the walls is inscribed with curving patterns. Buhru carvings. Takes me a moment to realize what they are.

“That’s a lot of serpents,” I say, stating the obvious.

Huh. Maybe there’s something to this wild-eel chase after all.

“Still think this is nothing but a myth?” T.F. asks.

I just grunt in reply. Even if I am startin’ to come around, I ain’t giving him the satisfaction yet.

See, the thing we’ve been hired to find is a Bilgewater legend, something any sane individual would dismiss as no more real than the Tidal Trickster, or the legends of the Summoners.

The Abyssal Crown.

It’s said that whoever wears the crown commands the Beasts Below. And whoever commands the Beasts Below would control the waters around the Serpent Isles. Control them, and, well, you’d naturally control Bilgewater.

That’s why the Prince is so desperate to get his golden hands on it. Not much Missy Fortune could do to dispute his claim if he was wearing the Abyssal Crown.

“So, where’s the shrine?” I say.

“There’s a passage leading farther in, back over there,” T.F. says, gesturing deeper into the cave. “Perhaps it’s through there.”

“No more swimmin’, I hope,” I mutter.

The “passage” T.F. found ain’t much more than a crack in the rocks. He’s got no meat on his bones and slips through like a flounder. Mine is the more robust—and I daresay, more admirable—physique, and I lose a few buttons tryin’ to squeeze through.

I’m grumblin’ and swearin’ under my breath, cursing that double helping of chowder I scarfed down earlier in the night, when T.F. shushes me, forefinger tapping pointedly on his lips.

With a final grunt I’m through, almost falling flat on my face. Then the smell hits me like a fist. It’s a stink not dissimilar to the vile offal-and-fish-guts reek of the slaughter docks. Makes the eyes water. Brings back bad memories, too.

Moonlight filters down through a gap in the cave ceiling, but it’s still dark. Takes me a moment to register the sheer amount of flotsam and jetsam piled up around the place. It looks like a hoarder’s paradise, with all manner of junk and refuse filling every nook and cranny.

This cavern’s larger than the last, and every part of it—well, every part that doesn’t have random crap heaped up against it—is also covered in Buhru carvings. More serpents. I’m sensing a theme here…

There’s a big old pool of black water to one side, probably connected to the same bastard tunnel that tried to drown me, but there’s no way all this refuse and junk got washed in here. Nah, this was brought here by someone. In truth, there’s a strange kinda order to it, even if it’s the kinda order imposed by a mind twisted like a sailor’s knot.

There’re barrels and boxes, chests, and nets. Fishing tackle and rusted harpoons, lengths of long-rotted rope. Piles of shells and stones are arranged in strange stacks, and jars of fetid liquid and gods-know-what-else are lined up on crude shelves made from driftwood.

A rusted anchor leans against a wall, and a ship’s barnacle-covered figurehead—a buxom lass with a fish tail—is wedged between a couple of boulders. Her flaking paint makes it look like her skin is coming off.

Broken masts criss-cross overhead like crooked rafters. Seaweed hangs from them in long strands, alongside little bundles of slowly spinning fishbones and twigs, tied with twine and hair, and torn ribbons of rotting sails.

And there, in the shadows toward the far wall, half hidden among the bric-a-brac, there’s something that looks an awful lot like…

“You think that’s it?” I whisper.

It’s an altar of sorts, carved straight outta the stone wall. Made to look like a swarming mass of sea serpents—red fins, bile belchers, ebony spine-throats, the lot of ’em. It’s surrounded by hundreds of unlit candles, melted wax everywhere, as well as dozens of skulls from all manner of beasties. More than a few human skulls in there, too.

“The Abyssal Shrine.” There’s awe in T.F.’s voice. He’s always been a superstitious type, being river folk and all. “Yeah, that’s it, all right.”

T.F. starts picking his way over to the shrine. I follow a little more slowly, eyeing the shadows. Feels like about now is when something bad would usually happen. That tends to be the way these things go for us. ’Course, I’m also watching T.F.

“You better not be tryin’ to pocket that crown on the sly,” I growl. He gives me a dirty look, but doesn’t bother replying.

Something catches my eye, then, and I think my heart stops for a second.

There’s an elderly woman lying on a knee-high rock shelf nearby. I almost missed her, scanning right over her before I realized what I was seeing.

“Ah hells,” I breathe. Now my heart’s going again, beating like a Noxian war drum.

She’s on her back, hands clasped in front of her, like a statue of the dead. Actually, by the looks of her, she might well be dead, or damn close. Her clothes are half rotten, and she’s the color of a week-dead fish. Might be the light, or lack thereof, but it also looks mighty like the veins in her see-through skin are ink black.

“There’s, ah, an old lady over here,” I hiss.

T.F.’s at the shrine, giving it the once over. “Huh?” he says absently.

“I said there’s an old lady over here,” I repeat, a little louder, glancing over at her to see if she wakes up. She doesn’t.

T.F. glances back. “What’s she doing?”

“Sleepin’,” I whisper. “Or being dead. I dunno which.” I give her a sniff and almost retch. “But she stinks somethin’ fierce. So probably dead.”

T.F. is making his concerned face, his brows meeting in the middle. He usually reserves that for a really bad hand of cards, or finding a fresh stain on the ridiculously overpriced tailored jacket he got in Piltover.

“I guess… just leave her be, then?” he says.

Brilliant. I change the subject. “Any sign of the crown?”

“No.” He turns back to the shrine. “It should be here…”

I move toward him, to help with the search, when the woman gives a rasping snort behind me. I turn fast, shotgun leveled, but she doesn’t stir. Alive, then.

I look at what I’m doing, and shift my aim toward the sky. What was I gonna do, shoot a sleeping old grandma? No matter how bad she smells, that seems like it would just be inviting a whole shipload of bad luck down upon us.

Turning back, I keep a wary eye on the old bat, just in case. Then I step on something. Something that moves. Something that gives out a muffled shriek.

There’s another person in here, completely buried beneath a pile of rotting sailcloth.

He scrabbles away from me like a cornered dog, panicked eyes wild. By the cut of his clothes and the gold earring, he has the look of a sailor, but one that ain’t had a good feed in a while. It’s then that I see the rusted shackle around his leg, connected to a chain, which in turn is bolted to the wall nearby.

Seeing he’s no threat, I ease Destiny’s barrels up. I nod to T.F., who’d spun around, glowing cards at the ready.

“Easy now,” I say to the captive, holding up a hand. “Ain’t here to do you no harm.”

“Get me out of here,” he whispers, eyes dartin’ between me and the sleeping old woman. “I don’t want to be no sacrifice. Was just sent to look for the crown! Get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out—”

His voice is gettin’ louder as his panic builds. Who knows how long the poor fella’s been chained to a wall down here? Or why?

“Now then, son, keep it down,” I say, trying to be all calm like.

“—get me out of here, get me—”

“Shut him up,” hisses T.F.

“Why you always got to order me around, huh?” I snap, makin’ a show of turning toward my partner in crime and jabbing a finger at him. “I got this, alright? It’s just like when—”

It’s a simple misdirection technique, one I learned from T.F., actually. Get your mark’s attention with a sudden movement, direct their focus where you want ’em to look, and they won’t see the thing you don’t want ’em to see.

Case in point: the prisoner’s frantic gaze shifts to T.F., and he don’t notice me stepping in close ’til it’s too late. I slam the butt of Destiny square into his face. I ain’t tryin’ to kill him, but I want him to have a good long sleep.

I throw a glance over my shoulder, but it seems the old bird didn’t hear anything. Probably stone deaf. Still, the sailor seemed pretty worked up. I’m startin’ to get the feelin’ there’s somethin’ mighty wrong about her…

“Nicely done,” T.F. says.

I give him a nod, and kneel down beside the unconscious captive. He looks a bit familiar… “Think I recognize him,” I say. I yank down his collar, popping a few buttons. Yep, there it is—a small tattoo, a pair of crossed hand cannons. “Yeah, this is one of Missy Fortune’s boys. High-ranking one, too. Reckon she’d pay handsomely to have him back.”

T.F. grunts in amusement. “Seems the Prince isn’t the only one after the crown.”

“Looks like. Wonder if she’d pay better?”

“Need to find it first,” he says.

“What did he say about being a sacrifice?”

Far as I’m concerned, if that old woman is strong enough to overpower Miss Fortune’s man, she’s either got help—which could be close by—or there’s much more to her than it seems. Either way, I ain’t keen to stick around.

“Let’s just get out of here,” I mutter. “This don’t feel good.”

“But we’re so close!” T.F. says. “It’s right here, I know it! Give me a little longer.”

Feels strange, me wanting to cut and run and him wanting to stay. That ain’t the way these things usually play out.

I cast another uneasy glance at the old lady, but give a reluctant nod. “Alright. But be quick.”

T.F. seats himself on the floor, and starts dealing out cards before him, face down, in a symmetrical pattern. I leave him to it, and start poking around, prodding into dark spaces with Destiny’s barrels, and being a bit more cautious of where I plant my feet. I find some old, tarnished coins, and am more than a little surprised to see a few gold Krakens among ’em. I pocket those, sliding a glance over at T.F. to make sure he doesn’t notice.

“You certain it’s here?” I say.

T.F. lifts up a card so I can see it. The picture looks like… well, it looks like a gold crown in the shape of a serpent.

“Don’t think I’ve seen that card before,” I say.

“Nor have I,” says T.F. “It’s never existed, ’til now. The crown’s here. Somewhere.”

I’ll never really understand those cards of his.

I keep searching, but after a while, I get the sense we’re being watched. Can’t say I much like the feeling. I turn around in place, looking into the darkness. There’re flickers of movement at the corners of my vision, but it all goes still when I focus on them. I try to shake it off. Probably just more crabs. Still, it seems like getting out of here would be a good idea, sooner rather than later.

T.F. mutters to himself, then scoops up his cards. He looks around, frowning. “You get the feeling we’re being watched?”

Not just me, then. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse. I catch another glimpse of movement, and find my eye drawn to an upturned bucket on the floor.

Did it—did it just move?

I keep focused on it, and after a moment, the bucket does indeed inch along the floor, just a smidge, before stopping again. I reckon I’ve seen a few odd things in my life, but can’t say I’ve ever seen a bucket acting sneaky before.

I take a step closer, leaning down toward it. There’s a hole in the side of it, and it looks like… yep, there’s an eye staring out, right back at me. A big, yellow, staring eye.

“Got you now, you little—” I say, leveling Destiny at it.

Seeing its ruse is up, whatever’s within flips over the bucket and makes a break for it. I almost shoot, before I see it’s nothing but a damn octopus. I hear T.F. chortle as the rubbery thing goes squelching across the cave floor, hauling itself along with a surprising turn of speed.

It’s only got a single eye, and it’s still staring at me as it scoots backward.

“That’s… not something you see every day,” T.F. says.

The gangly green thing flops along to the base of the rock shelf where the old woman sleeps. It reaches up with a pair of tentacles and starts climbing.

“Well, don’t let it wake her up!” hisses T.F.

“What d’you want me to do, shoot it? Don’t you think that might just wake her up?”

T.F. has a card at the ready, but doesn’t throw, probably on account of not wanting to risk hitting the old woman. “I don’t know. Grab it or something!”

“I ain’t touchin’ no one-eyed octopus, Tobias.”

He gives me a look at the use of his real name. “I’ve told you not to call me that,” he says. “It’s Twisted Fate now, all right?”

I roll my eyes. “I ain’t callin’ you that. It’s stupid an’ pretentious an’—”

The old woman gives a shuddering snort, and we cease our bickering instantly. We look over to see the slimy beastie wrapping its tentacles around her face. There’s an unpleasant squelching sound as it pulls itself onto her head, like a grotesque bonnet, and attaches. Its big yellow eye blinks.

“That ain’t right,” I murmur.

Then the old woman sits bolt upright.

Now, I’m secure enough in myself to admit the sound I made when the old lady sat up was perhaps a little more shrill than I’m proud of. But to be fair, T.F.’s cry was even less dignified than mine.

The old woman’s eyes snap open. They’re as white as serpent milk. Blind she might be, but she turns toward us all the same.

“More little rats, sneaking and thieving?” she says. Her voice sounds like, well, exactly how you’d imagine an old sea witch with an octopus on her head would sound. “Naughty rats, nothing here for you, oh no…”

“Now hold on just one moment, lady,” I say, as she swings her legs around and plants her bare feet on the cave floor. I’ve got Destiny leveled at her, but she don’t seem to care. “We ain’t no rats, and we ain’t no thieves. Well, we are thieves, but, well—”

I look over at T.F.

“Help me out, would you?” I hiss.

“We’re looking for the Abyssal Crown,” T.F. says. “If you’d be so kind as to hand it over, there doesn’t need to be any trouble.”

The old witch stands up with the aid of a serpent-headed staff. Didn’t notice that earlier. She turns her blank, cloudy eyes toward us, and gives a toothless smile. “Silly, silly rats,” she says, drooling. “Already drowned. Promised to the Beasts Below, and don’t even know it.”

She slams her staff down on the floor. Reverberations shudder through the cave, and ripples spread across the black water. There’s a clicking sound, like lots of sticks and twigs breaking, and the walls come alive with movement.

Things detach from the surrounding darkness.

Big things.

“Crabs,” I mutter. “’Course it had to be crabs.”

These ain’t normal crabs, though—not that I’d describe anything with that many legs as normal under regular circumstances, but these things are something else. They’re about the size of small wagons, for starters, and they seem mighty intent on ripping us limb from limb.

They come skittering toward us, each waving a giant blue claw. Gotta say, it looks a whole lot more threatening when that claw’s big enough to snip a man in two. More of them break the surface of the water, chittering and snapping, scuttling sideward up into the cave.

“Eat this, you leggy son of a…!” I roar, and unleash both barrels into the first to come at us.

The blast is deafening, and hurls the giant crab backward with satisfying violence. A flash of red, and T.F. sends one of his cards slicing into the middle of a cluster of them. It explodes, catching the lot of ’em in a burst of sorcerous flames.

I reload just in time to pump a shot into another of the skittering beasts, blasting its overgrown claw to pieces. Shards of crab shell and wet meat splatter outward, and the behemoth staggers. My second shell disintegrates its eyestalks and clacking mandibles, and it’s thrown onto its back. Kicks like a damn mule, does Destiny.

One tries to flank T.F., and I give a shout of warning. He dives, sliding underneath a snapping claw, and flicks another card. It hits the creature with a golden flash. The crab goes instantly still, frozen in place. Freshly reloaded, I step up and blast it back into the water in a shower of crab bits.

“We gotta get out of here!” I holler.

“Not without the crown!” T.F. calls back, dodging a claw.

Feels to me like he’s trying to make a point. See, T.F.’s got a history of taking off as soon as things start to look dicey, leaving me to pick up the pieces. But he swears that’s not his way anymore, and I guess he’s willing to die to prove it. Well, that’s just damn stupid. Admirable, but stupid.

“Ain’t no good to us if we’re dead!” I shout.

I take another shot, but one of the damn crabs grabs Destiny in its claw as I squeeze the trigger. It drags my aim off, and I hit the Abyssal Shrine, blasting it apart.

The sea witch—who, I might add, has been cackling away like a fiend this whole time—screeches in fury.

I’m wrestlin’ with the crab that’s got Destiny in its claw. I ain’t releasing my grip, and the crab don’t seem inclined to, neither.

I snarl. “That’s mine, you scuttling—”

A pair of cards slices through the air, taking off each of the crab’s eye stalks. That makes it let go, and it staggers off blindly, bumping into walls and other scuttlers.

I nod my thanks, but T.F. ain’t lookin’. He’s starin’ over at the shrine. Well, where the shrine was. Now it’s mostly a pile of rocks. Seems it was hollow the whole time, and that my wayward shot bust it wide open.

“Well, would you look at that,” I say.

Seems someone was entombed inside. They’re nothing more than dried bones now, sticking out of the rubble. There’s a tarnished crown circling their skull, too, a crown that glints like gold, and is fashioned in the form of a hissing serpent…

I cast a glance over at the witch. She looks mighty displeased with this turn of events. Scowling, she starts to rise up off the floor. For a second I wonder if I hit my head harder than I first thought, and I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m seeing things right.

But I’m not imagining it. She’s now hovering a good two feet off the ground.

“Huh,” I say.

With a snarl, the witch jabs her staff toward us, and a hole opens up in the air. Now, admittedly that doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it’s the best I got to describe it. The hole’s about the size of a cannonball, at least to start with, but it quickly expands, like a rip in a ship’s hull. A torrent of frigid seawater spills through it, and I go down to one knee as I lose my footing.

There’s movement in the hole as well, and a massive yellow eye appears, iris contracting sharply as it peers through. Looks just like the eye of the octopus thing latched atop the witch’s head, only a hundred, no, a thousand times bigger. I get the feelin’ it’s somewhere deep, deep down in the darkest ocean depths, but here it is, eye-balling us like we’re bait on the end of a line.

Next I know, the eye pulls away, and two giant tentacles lash through the hole. I unleash both barrels, and blow one of those tentacles clean off. It flops to the cave floor, spraying blue blood all over as it thrashes and wriggles. The other one wraps around a giant crab, lifting it easily, and whips it back into the hole.

The old sea witch remains floating in place, with an evil grin. Seems she’s happy to hang back and watch her beast finish us off.

“Get the damn crown!” I bark, pushing back to my feet and fumbling with a pair of fresh shells.

Again the yellow eye races up to the hole, peering through. It looks at T.F., but I shout and wave my arms, and its giant pupil snaps toward me.

A tentacle darts through and wraps around me. Damn near crushes my ribcage as it squeezes and lifts me off my feet. It starts pulling me in, but before I’m dragged through the hole to gods-know-where, I manage to get Destiny up, and level it at the eye.

Seems to me there’s a certain level of intelligence in that gaze, more than one’d expect of a big ol’ sea monster. It sees Destiny and has an inkling of what’s coming, ’cause the eye pulls back, fast. Not fast enough, mind. Destiny roars, barking fire and brimstone, and I hear—and feel—the great beast’s roar of pain.

I’m dropped abruptly to the floor. Water continues to pour into the cave, sending me tumbling head over arse before I’m slammed against the wall. Thankfully, I’ve still got a hold of Destiny—I’m none too eager to head back to Piltover to get another made just yet—but she likely took some water during my little spill.

I come up spluttering. Feels like I’ve swallowed half of Bilgewater Bay. I see T.F. lift the crown off the skeleton, and he gives me a quick nod.

“Now we go,” he says.

I scramble to my feet. Seems like, for the moment at least, the beast behind the hole has backed off, though water keeps pouring through. The whole cave’s knee deep, and refuse and junk are floating around. The giant crabs—those few still here—are milling around, confused as to what’s going on.

The witch’s captive is awake now. He’s climbed up onto a rock, and is staring around him, terrified. Can’t say I blame him. He’s still chained up as well, which ain’t ideal for him with the rising water.

I aim Destiny at the chain and pull the trigger—least I can do is give the fella a fighting chance—but nothing happens. Seems water did get into her workings.

“Sorry, friend,” I say with a shrug.

The witch sees T.F. with the crown, and hisses in fury. She starts floating over toward us, toes dragging in the frigid brine.

T.F. tosses the crown to me, and I awkwardly catch it.

“Why you givin’ it to me?” I have to yell to be heard over the sound of the roaring water.

“Figured you wouldn’t want to let it out of your sight,” he shouts back. “That you wouldn’t trust me to shift out with it.”

I consider that for half a second. Gotta say, I’m a little surprised, and a little impressed. If T.F. keeps this up, I might just have to reassess my opinion of him.

Still, the witch is now focused on me, and it looks like she’s mouthing a curse. As I said, I ain’t the superstitious type, but I ain’t stupid, neither. I toss the crown back to him.

“I trust ya,” I shout. “More or less.”

I take another glance at the witch. Behind her, the big old yellow eye is peeking through the hole again. I feel a moment of satisfaction to see an angry red mark where Destiny bit.

T.F. flicks out a trio of cards, each trailing sorcerous flame, but the witch makes a dismissive gesture. An invisible force knocks them off course, and they fail to hit home. On she comes, floating closer.

She’s smiling her toothless grin now, exposing rotting gums. Seems to reason she thinks she’s got us dead to rights.

“Go, get out of here!” I shout to T.F., even as I swing Destiny over my shoulders. No time to see her wrapped and watertight. If I get out of this mess, she’ll need some tending.

“See you on the other side,” T.F. says with a wink. I believe him, too. Who would have thought?

“Take them, now!” shrieks the witch.

She points her staff at us, and the giant behemoth hurls itself forward, trying to push itself through the hole. A mass of tentacles squeeze out, reaching for us.

Time to leave. T.F. starts doing his thing, cards dancing, focusing on making his exit. Then he and the crown are gone.

My turn. I take a running jump into the dark pool even as tentacles whip toward me. Really hope this does connect to the tunnel I swam through, else that heroic leap’s gonna seem mighty daft.

I hit the water, diving deep, and start swimming. Can’t see anything worth a damn, but the time for caution is long past. If I smack straight into a wall, so be it. Right now that’s the least of my problems.

Thankfully, seems my hunch was right. I swim under a dark rock, blind, and come up on the other side. Back in the first cavern. I can hear the sea witch screeching in rage, echoing around the cave. Any moment, I expect some big damn tentacles to snake through and pull me back.

Sucking in a deep breath, I dive again.

I surface with a gasp. Shoulda been easier coming back, knowing where I was going, but it damn near killed me.

Hands grab me and haul me up. After more than a little swearing and grunting, both T.F. and I flop into the boat, Intrepid.

“Why you gotta be so damn heavy?” he groans.

“Why you gotta be so damn scrawny?” I throw back.

I have no idea if the sea witch or her pets are coming after us, but it don’t seem like a good idea to stick around and find out. I grab hold of the oars and start pulling.

There’s a ship waiting for us, just beyond the Widow Makers. It’s a sleek cutter, built for speed—the Ascended Empress. It’s a gaudy thing, decked out with gold leaf and a cat-headed woman for a figurehead, presumably the aforementioned empress.

“Guess the Prince’s eager to get a hold of his prize, eh?” says T.F, as the cutter turns toward us.

“Seems like.”

Within minutes, the Empress is alongside us. A net’s thrown down, and eager hands haul us aboard once we clamber to the top.

The Prince and his crew are there to greet us. He’s an odd one, the Prince, always has been. Claims to be descended from the lost rulers of the Shuriman sandlands, and waltzes around wearing gold paint caked on his face. Always pays well, though.

“You have it?” asks the Prince. He’s so eager, he’s practically licking his golden lips.

“You got our coin?” I say.

A pair of purses, bulging with Krakens, are thrown at our feet. I stoop down to inspect them. Got a good heft. Like I said, the Prince’s always been one to pay well.

T.F. hands over the crown, and the Prince takes it, full of reverence. “The Abyssal Crown,” he breathes. He stares at it a moment longer, then places it atop his smooth, golden head.

A broad smile creeps across his face. He gives us an appreciative nod, and strides onto the foredeck. He steps up to the bow and leans out, facing the open ocean, and lifts his arms high.

“Rise!” he bellows, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hear my command, oh dwellers of the deep! Rise and come to me!”

The Prince’s crew are watching expectantly. I catch T.F.’s eye, and nod down toward Intrepid.

I really didn’t expect the crown to work—and part of me figured we’d best not be around when I was proved right—but after everything else I’d seen tonight, I wasn’t dismissing the chance that it might. And if it did, well, that seemed like an even better reason to be far, far away. Besides, that old sea witch probably ain’t gonna be too impressed with someone messin’ with her property.

Still, it’s more than a little surprising when the biggest damn creature I’ve ever seen breaches some hundred feet or so off the Ascended Empress’ starboard.

T.F. and I, we’re already half a league away, heading madly for port, but even from here, the scale of the thing is almost impossible to comprehend.

“Huh,” I grunt.

T.F. can’t even manage that. He stands, all fear of tipping overboard momentarily forgotten, and stares, mouth agape, at the distant sea monster.

I can just make out the tiny figure of the Prince, standing on the Ascended Empress’ deck, arms still lifted to the sky.

The beast continues to rise. It could be mistaken for a small island, though to be fair, not many islands have bloody great glowing lures atop their heads, or teeth the length of a ship’s keel, or masses of coiling tentacles, or pallid dead eyes the size of the moon.

Almost lazily, the gargantuan beast reaches out and wraps the Ascended Empress in its tentacles. The cutter lists to the side, cannons and crew falling into the sea. I can still see the Prince, clinging to the foredeck. Then the behemoth’s immense, distended jaw snaps, biting off the front half of the ship, swallowing it whole—along with the Prince.

It’s over in moments. Before Fifth Bell tolls, all evidence of the Ascended Empress is gone, and the great beast has disappeared beneath the surface.

“Huh,” I say again. Don’t think either of us expected that.

After a while, I start rowing. It’s only once we’re tied up at the White Wharf, and are back on solid ground, that we speak.

“Well, that was really… somethin’,” I say.

“It was.”

“Reckon that sea witch is gonna be comin’ after us?”

“I reckon so.”

I grunt, and we both stand in silence, staring back out across the bay.

“Drink?” says T.F., finally.

I suddenly remember those extra Krakens I pocketed in the witch’s cave. Might not be a bad idea to be rid of them sooner than later.

“Drink,” I agree, with a nod. “And it’s on me.”

Sarah Fortune reclines, boots up on the table. She sips from an ornate goblet, making a show of being casual… though hidden unseen in one of her deep coat pockets, she clasps a loaded hand cannon.

A veritable mother lode of old coins, artifacts, and precious gemstones are piled upon the table before her. Even encrusted in verdigris, barnacles, and dried seaweed, it’s clearly enough to buy up half the Slaughter Fleets. Nevertheless, Sarah Fortune pretends to be unimpressed. No need to seem too eager.

“So, in return for my man, and this lot,” she says, gesturing languidly at the treasure, “what exactly is it you want?”

The sea witch stares at her with her blank, milky gaze. The golden eye of the creature affixed to her head, however, blinks.

“Two rats, promised to the Beasts Below,” the witch hisses. “Find them for me, and all this, and more, shall be yours…”

Tryndamere came into the world knowing only the harshness of survival, for the frozen steppes where his clan made their home never truly thawed. Though they praised all the Freljord’s old gods, as well as the Cult of the Three, they prayed most often to a spirit-deity known to ravage the tundra—a hearty and unkillable tusklord. Since the raw materials required for armor were scarce, the clan instead put its resources toward the forging of great blades, inspired by their god’s ivory canines.

The stamina and dueling prowess of Tryndamere’s people became legendary. They were able to fend off other raiding tribes, slay the great beasts of the mountains, and repel Noxians encroaching to the south. Tryndamere himself grew to be a brash and formidable warrior, but it wasn’t until a particularly cruel midwinter night that his strength was truly tested. An unusual storm swept in from the east, bringing with it an icy darkness, and a towering, horned figure silhouetted against the full moon.

Some in the clan knelt, believing that their boar-god stood among them. This creature dripped with ancient magic, true enough, but he was not of the Freljord… and those that knelt were the first to die.

Tryndamere looked on in horror. He could feel unhinged brutality rising in his heart at the sight of the invader’s cruel, living sword. Whether taken by bloodlust or some other madness, Tryndamere raised his own blade, and let out a defiant roar.

The dark figure swatted him aside like an insect.

Tryndamere lay surrounded by the dead, in snow soaked almost black with blood. He drew what he thought would be his last breaths as the creature approached and spoke. Tryndamere tried to hold onto the strange, archaic words, but as his life force slipped away, it was the thing’s laughter that burned itself into the young warrior’s memory.

For Tryndamere did not die that night. He was revived by a rage unlike anything he had ever experienced. He looked to the eastern horizon, intent on avenging not only the destruction of his clan, but the desecration of his own martial pride.

However, retribution was not what the steppes offered him. There were survivors, and they would not be long for this world if Tryndamere could not find others to shelter them. There were Noxians to the south, Frostguard to the north, and the dark figure had come from the east. To the west, it was said that some tribes were gathering before the supposed reincarnation of Avarosa—once, he might have dismissed such fanciful rumors, but now he knew this was his only recourse.

Tryndamere and the remnants of his people arrived in the valley as little more than beggars. The young warrior was determined to show his clan’s worth, and win them the Avarosan leader’s protection so that he could return to thoughts of revenge. Brandishing his tusked sword, he did what came naturally, and challenged others to duels. Holding the image of the dark figure and its echoing laughter in his mind, Tryndamere quickly bested anyone who stepped forward.

His singular fury was deeply unsettling to the Avarosans. The northern warriors, too, noted his rapid healing between bouts—unlike the Iceborn that walked among them, the more Tryndamere gave in to his rage, the more quickly his body healed. Many suspected he and his clan practiced strange and unnatural magics, and so Tryndamere’s plan to prove his worth was now endangering the wider acceptance of his people.

But not all of the Avarosans had turned against him. Their warmother, Ashe, was looking to strengthen her position with a political marriage… to someone who could face down the endless challengers for her hand, and to her rule. Seeing an opportunity in the handsome barbarian, she pledged to take in his clan as Avarosans, if Tryndamere became her first and only bloodsworn.

As he spent more time in Ashe’s company, he began to believe what others had whispered—that she was indeed the divine reincarnation of Avarosa herself. His rage found temperance in her thoughtful leadership, and a genuine affection grew between them.

Even so, serving as Ashe’s champion, Tryndamere now looks to an uncertain future. The barbarian king can see war brewing all too clearly on the Freljord’s horizon, yet he still thirsts for his own, personal vengeance, and begins to wonder if his predestined fate might not be at his queen’s side after all…

The Lhotlan vastaya once lived on the ancient, mystical borders of Ionia’s deep forests, on the eastern island of Qaelin. It was a place where magic was breathed like air, and time had little meaning. To these chimeric creatures, the lands of mortals were an unforgiving desert, virtually devoid of magic—and over the centuries, that desert only grew, encroaching on the vastaya’s territories.

Rakan was born into a tribe in decline, yet he never gave up hope.

Like his brethren, Rakan watched as human settlements continued to expand, damming the flow of Ionia’s wild, chaotic magic for their own safety. Many tribes sent emissaries to negotiate with them, securing treaties to protect the mystical energy the vastaya needed to thrive. Yet over and over again, these promises were broken.

Disillusioned, most vastaya became increasingly isolationist as they clung to their remaining lands. But young Rakan advocated a different path. The battle-dancer believed that mortals could be convinced to let wild magic run free if they could only appreciate its beauty, and he boasted that he was the one to make them see it. For this, he was labeled mu’takl—distrusted as a human sympathizer, and collaborator.

Rakan left the Lhotlan tribe, determined to spread the song of his people across Ionia. He was an entertaining rogue, a welcome performer at any tavern or village carnival, but over the years he realized that was all he was to mortals—no matter how many dances and songs he performed, no matter how much he enthralled the crowds, he merely provided diversion to drunken revelers.

Rakan grew restless, finding himself without purpose... until he had a chance encounter with Xayah, a fellow Lhotlan, at the harvest festival in Vlonqo.

Seeing her in the crowd, Rakan sang one of his old songs, entrancing the entire town with his gleaming plumage. Though countless human and vastayan women had fallen for him in the past, this violet raven seemed immune to his charms, though not uninterested.

How could she see him and yet choose not to follow him? It was a puzzle with no easy answer.

Intrigued, the battle-dancer approached Xayah and asked after the welfare of their tribe. When she told him that the Lhotlan had lost the last of their lands, Rakan howled with rage. This finally seemed to impress Xayah, and she assured him that there was still hope: she was part of something greater, a rebellion of sorts, to take back what the vastaya had lost. Not just for the Lhotlan, but for all tribes.

Rakan was thunderstruck. Here was a chance for him to redeem his people, a cause he was willing to die for. He implored Xayah to let him accompany her, and she agreed—as long as he carried his weight.

And, as Xayah would soon learn, Rakan’s dances were as impressive in battle as they were on stage. He called himself the greatest battle-dancer in Lhotlan history, a boast that none could refute. His grand entrances and dazzling acrobatics distracted and befuddled enemies, before Xayah felled them with her razor-sharp quills. In any dangerous situation, they fought together with uncanny harmony.

During their travels, Rakan became fascinated by how Xayah interacted with the world. She seemed always prepared, aloof, and focused... whereas he was absent-minded, affable, and lacking seriousness. Although Rakan would often forget her carefully laid plans, he made up for it with his ability to read the emotions of others, using charisma and insight to persuade them. The two vastaya were so different, and yet they achieved great feats, each one’s strengths complementing the other’s weaknesses.

Soon enough, Rakan couldn’t imagine life without Xayah, and it was clear that she felt the same for him. The pair pledged themselves to each other in the midst of a raucous tavern brawl.

Yet they did not see eye to eye in all things. Where she viewed the world as black and white, with mortals always the enemy, he had more compassion, and believed some of them were redeemable. Despite this difference, Rakan was certain that his and Xayah’s love for each other would bear them through the storms that lay ahead.

Through Xayah, Rakan has found purpose. Inspired by his partner’s singular drive, Rakan has made her crusade his own, and together they will fight to reclaim the First Lands for the vastaya.

In northwest Ionia, the island of Koyehn once stood beautiful and serene. Among its golden sands, seasonal bazaar, and quaint mill town sat the Temple of Koyehn, an ancient and renowned conservatory for the arts.

Lukai Hwei was born to inherit this temple.

Kind and precocious, Hwei spent his childhood putting to canvas his wild daydreams, which exaggerated the world around him into surreal, fantastical sights. He knew these visions differed from reality, but through them, he saw life itself as art. So connected was Hwei to the shades of the world that even his eye color shifted in hue to reflect his mind and mood.

Hwei expressed this vibrant imagination through paint magic, a medium that influenced the emotions of its audience. As such, it required strict control and discipline, lest it overpower both mental perceptions and bodily sensations. Among its current practitioners, those unable or unwilling to control their art endangered themselves and the community—and were banished from Koyehn.

Despite these precepts, young Hwei indulged his imagination. In a demonstration for the temple masters, he recreated Koyehn’s sea. As paint flowed around the canvas, however, his control ebbed. Emotion crashed through him, wild and fathomless as an ocean, and he surrendered himself to its beauty. His vision turned black, his last memory the awestruck masters, drowning.

Hwei awoke days later, surrounded by his masters—alive, but infuriated. They would not exile the temple’s heir, but they stressed his responsibilities. Hwei was horrified—but fascinated—by the depths of his power, and he craved to see more.

Thus, by day, he upheld Koyehn’s conventions. But alone at night, he pushed the boundaries, driven to explore the extent of his power. In time, this practice focused the intensity of Hwei’s imagination, allowing him to manifest a palette that flowed with magical paint.

Well into adulthood, Hwei mastered his craft. And with passion and humility, he prepared to inherit his birthright, surrounded by the respect and affection of his peers. But part of his mind remained forever shrouded at nightfall.

And so it remained, until the temple received a visiting artist: Khada Jhin.

Over a gilded summer, Hwei accompanied Jhin, guiding him around Koyehn. They often exchanged their creative perspectives, and, respecting their differences, Hwei recognized Jhin’s virtuosity and valued their time together.

But the night before Jhin’s departure, the man challenged Hwei. Jhin sensed that the pieces Hwei showed others were forced façades—and he wanted to see a real performance. Hwei tried to deny it, but his eyes betrayed him. Flooded by the years spent creating meaningless art, his imagination begged catharsis.

So Hwei painted. Decades of practice guided his brush. The night came alive, colored by the brilliant infinity of his mind. Emotions washed over him, harmonious and visceral, and Hwei welcomed them. Sharing these forbidden visions for another exhilarated him and illuminated the powers of his art: connection, inspiration, and unfettered creation.

Jhin witnessed all. Afterward, with eyes alight and tone inscrutable, he said farewell, stating he would be moving on tomorrow “to watch the lotuses bloom.”

At dawn, Hwei and his fellow artists awoke to a series of tragedies.

First: four historic paintings, destroyed.

Second: an arrangement of four bodies—the masters that Hwei had almost killed in his youth.

Third: the fiery eruption of the temple’s four lowest floors.

Amid the flames, Hwei imagined the air electric with color. Everything that lived within him bled outward.

It was terrifying. It was beautiful. It was... art. Realizing its dark potential—of destruction, devastation, and torment—Hwei felt the same horror and fascination he had in his youth.

The temple quickly collapsed into ruins, with Hwei emerging as its only survivor.

Exhausted and guilt-ridden, he mourned. Yet his imagination overflowed, reliving every moment of the disaster.

During the day, Hwei and the villagers from the mill town held burials. At night, he revisited the ashen-gray wreckage and painted, his palette taking the shape of Koyehn’s crest—the same worn over his heart.

On one such night, Hwei found the remnants of a trap beneath the rubble—one petaled like a lotus flower.

Realizing who’d wreaked this havoc, a cascade of emotions engulfed Hwei. Fear. Sorrow. Betrayal... Awe.

A question burned within him: why?

But did he want the answer? Or would it be safer to suppress this need? He could stay here with his people—as the heir—help them rebuild... or...

Bearing little more than his paintbrush and palette, Hwei left his island, and his people, behind.

In the time since, Hwei has learned that the answers he seeks arise through revealing the full extent of his art to others. He tracks down nefarious individuals in Ionia’s darkest corners, unleashing scenes of suffering upon them to understand his own well of pain. Yet he also reaches out to Ionia’s victims—fellow witnesses—to create shared tranquility and reflection.

Both the relentless artist rising from the ashes and the kindhearted man from a once-peaceful isle, Hwei faces the conflicting hues of Ionia—and his own imagination. As he spirals deeper into the shadows, he lights a path, mind brimming with possibility.

Which shade of himself will triumph, however, is yet to be seen.