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Saijax Cail-Rynx Icath’un grew up in Icathia, a satrapy of the Shuriman empire. Ever since he was a boy, his father told him of when their home was a proud, independent nation, before it was ground under the heel of Shuriman oppression. He told him of the Kohari, heroes who protected Icathia and its Mage King. The Mage King had resisted Shurima’s conquest, but when he died in battle, his Kohari protectors followed him, committing ritual suicide. The Shuriman emperor displayed the Kohari’s decaying bodies for all to see, and the Mage King himself was impaled above the city gates, his bones left to molder.

Saijax’s father had witnessed this cruel act, and over time he passed down to his son the burning resentment that was growing in every Icathian heart. Even so, Saijax committed himself to the study of arms, learning from Shurima’s weapons masters as well as his own clan’s elders.

After many centuries of Shuriman rule, a massive earthquake struck the coastal province of Saabera. The destruction revealed something hidden deep beneath the earth, something dark and of great power—perhaps strong enough even to overcome Shurima’s god-like Ascended warriors. Saijax was entrusted with protecting the Icathian mages who encountered this discovery… which the guards just barely contained with brazier-staves that blazed with conjured elemental fire. Disturbed, he escorted the mages to the governing council so they could tell of what they’d learned.

They called this power the Void.

Immediately the council recognized its potential, but Saijax saw the doom the Void portended. As a master of weaponry, he knew the danger of using a weapon they could neither fully understand nor safely harness. He regretted that he didn’t kill the mages as they rode from Saabera. He would regret it even more in the days to come.

Confident that the Void could defeat their Shuriman overlords, the council crowned a new Mage King. The Kohari were rebuilt, with Saijax among the first to join their ranks. They triumphed in early engagements, and Saijax even killed one of the vaunted Ascended in battle, watching with pride as its corpse was paraded around the liberated city of Bai-Zhek.

When the Ascended Host approached Icathia, Saijax and his brethren assembled on the front lines. As the two armies churned the earth beneath them into crimson loam, Icathia’s mages and priests deemed the time had come to unleash the Void.

Ruin swept over the land, as Icathians, Shurimans, and even Ascended were unraveled from existence. The city’s walls collapsed as the Void swallowed thousands into cold, silent oblivion.

In moments, Icathia was lost.

Saijax rode to the ruined crater where the Void had been summoned, determined to fall upon his sword like the Kohari of old. But before he could take his life, he saw among the devastation a discarded brazier-stave that he recognized from Saabera—it still blazed with elemental fire that harmed the Void. This flame kindled a spark in Saijax’s heart. He took up the stave and left behind the ruins of his homeland, tending to this “last light of Icathia”, and the hope it represented.

Grieving and ashamed, Saijax Cail-Rynx Kohari Icath’un forsook his old name, and from that day was known only as Jax.

He became a wanderer, traveling across the known world and to places beyond any map. As he bore the elemental fire, Jax’s life extended beyond even the expectations of his long-lived people. Yet the farther he went from Icathia, the lower the flame burned, until it threatened to gutter out once and for all. Jax understood with grim resolution that he couldn’t run from his past. He had a duty to return, and fight. The advance of the Void had been halted by the last surviving Ascended, but its singular threat endured.

For centuries since, Jax has roamed, a vagabond warrior searching for those strong enough to rebuild the Kohari. Though he has fought countless times against beings of great skill, courage, and power, none have yet convinced him that they can march against the coming darkness. The fall of Icathia has plagued Jax with doubt, but one thing remains certain: when the final battle comes, Jax will stand against the Void.

Even if he has to face it alone.

The darkin are thrice-cursed—once by the ancient enemy they faced, again by the fall of their glorious empire, and finally by the betrayal that has damned them for all eternity.

When the rebels of Icathia foolishly unleashed the Void in battle, Shurima’s defense was led, as ever, by the legendary Ascended. Imbued with the power of the Sun Disc, these “god-warriors” towered over mortal soldiers, wielding magic and blade with equal ease, and eventually they were victorious. Even so, the horrors of the war took a heavy toll, and those who lived to remember it were perhaps never quite as they once were.

Centuries later, with the loss of mighty Azir at the very moment of his own Ascension, Shurima fell. Although apparently immortal, the god-warriors had been born human—gradually, with no emperor to lead them, many of the surviving Ascended began to falter in purpose as their older, petty ambitions resurfaced. They taught themselves forbidden sorceries, and came to view themselves as the rightful inheritors of the world. The scattered mortal populace named these new tyrants darkin, a whispered curse translating roughly in the old tongue as “the fallen.”

But even the darkin could not escape the sickness of soul that had come from fighting against the Void for so long. After centuries of uneasy alliance, they inevitably turned against one another—and so began the Great Darkin War.

This conflict spread from Shurima to Valoran, and beyond. The renegade god-warriors and the armies they raised were unstoppable, and entire nations were crushed between them. It seemed as though this would be the end of all things… until, unexpectedly, the mages of Runeterra learned how to contain the remaining darkin. Through secrecy and cunning artifice, the physical forms of the Ascended could be merged with the celestial power in their hearts, and all of it bound within the weapons they bore. With their leaders imprisoned forever, the rampaging hordes were broken and slain.

These darkin weapons were hidden, many of them carefully guarded by the mortal civilizations that grew in the aftermath—for it was clear that such power could be locked away, but never destroyed.

And, should such power fall into the wrong hands, the darkin will surely rise once more.

Icathia, most desolate and cursed of lands, was not always so. Theirs was a rich and diverse civilization, ruled by benevolent Axamuk, last of the Mage Kings of old. As the Shuriman empire expanded across the continent, Axamuk’s calls for peaceful coexistence were ignored, and his armies destroyed by the god-warriors of the Ascended Host.

Though humbled by this defeat, many Icathians saw an opportunity for mutual advancement. Accepting an offer of autonomous satrapy, they installed a governing council of distinguished mages, philosophers, and lawmakers to oversee the transition of power.

After almost nine centuries of imperial rule, a young man named Zilean joined the council’s ranks. He was an elemental mage with a prodigious understanding of physical reality, who had studied under the greatest minds of the age—from the great Yun of Ixtal, to the astromancers of Faraj, and countless others besides.

There was one component of the material realm that few had ever truly grasped, but Zilean was determined to master.

Time.

Time was the one inescapable constant, in all things. Even the mighty god-warriors were not immune to its passage… though they were revered above all others in Shuriman culture.

As part of the political establishment, Zilean now saw more clearly the smoldering discontent among the citizens of Icathia. While their land was home to some of the most heroic leaders and revolutionary thinkers in the empire, not one had ever been deemed worthy of Ascension. Again and again, the council submitted petitions to the distant emperor, yet access to the Sun Disc was denied, without explanation. For all they gave, it seemed Icathians would never be seen as equals.

Zilean’s own resentment grew, yet he was worried by open talk of secession among his peers. He was a patriot through and through, but in the face of the Ascended Host, any rebellion could only end in calamity for his people. Seeking a diplomatic solution, he went as an envoy to neighboring Kahleek, Kalduga, and Ixtal. He had made many allies in his lifetime, and he implored them to stand with Icathia.

Each time, the answer was the same. They would not defy Shurima. If Zilean’s people wanted to, they would do so alone.

Returning home, he was shocked to find the council had decided to crown a new Mage King. Breathlessly, joyously, they told Zilean of the ancient and forbidden power they had discovered—a power so great, it would all but guarantee Icathia’s victory.

They told Zilean of the power of the Void.

He looked to these reasoned, wise Icathians, but saw only madness in their eyes. As much as it grieved him, Zilean would rather his homeland’s revolution be crushed, than to let this abomination be set loose.

Zilean’s worst fears proved true. Once unleashed in battle, the Void overwhelmed the mages attempting to control it, and Icathia was doomed.

As he tried to escape the capital, the ground shook. Buildings toppled. Such horrors as had no place in this world or the next erupted from the depths, driving terrified citizens before them.

They were trapped. Hundreds of thousands of innocents would die. In desperation, Zilean urged as many as he could to take refuge in his tower, and did the impossible.

He removed the entire structure from time.

Crashing to the cold floor, his power spent, Zilean looked at the frozen figures all around him. The Void was halted, but only within those walls—outside, where Icathia once stood, there was nothing.

Zilean had spent decades trying to comprehend the mysteries of time and causality, and it seemed only he could move freely back and forth within the anomaly he had somehow created. These people had been saved, true enough. He just didn’t know how to undo what he had done to achieve it. Through deep meditations and esoteric devices of his own design, he began to divine the strands of past and present that led to this moment, gradually learning how to move back and forth along them, looking for a future where his efforts had already succeeded…

It was there that he found the true threat: the end of everything. The great unmaking that awaits Runeterra.

Effectively, Zilean now exists everywhere, and always has. Even so, he is only too aware of the consequences of trying to bring about change in the world and sparking other unexpected destinies—often conflicting, and almost always more dangerous. Perhaps if he can find a way to save his own people, then the greater disaster might also be averted.

The only question is, what might he be willing to sacrifice along the way?

Shurima is dying. I do not think she will rise again.

The emptiness that writhes in the very bones of my homeland is a malignant, unspeakable thing. It spreads. It devours. Its merest touch is death. A thousand deaths—a thousand, times a thousand, times a thousand. Perhaps once there were some who could stand against it and hope to prevail, but no longer.

I walk here, alone, in the darkest places beneath the world, and I see it with my own eyes, through the finely crafted lenses of my helm. What is seen cannot be unseen, and what is known cannot be forgotten. Not here. I am weary, so very weary.

Still, I walk.

I can no longer feel the ground beneath me, nor the bare rock of the cavern walls, but so, too, am I spared the worst of the numbing winds that rise from the depths. I give thanks for that, for truly this is a chill beyond the desert’s night. I have sat upon the endless plain of the Sai Faraj beneath the first moon of winter, and yet never known anything like this. It is the deep cold of the Void, which the ancients—in their ignorance—might have named as their underworld, and the source of all evil in the mortal realm.

The truth is worse, I think. The air itself feels wrong, and unnatural, throbbing with a fierce, purple un-light that pains the mind.

And from the shadows that even my eyes cannot pierce, you come.

Three. Four. Maybe five. It is difficult to say. A hundred and more of your kind have I faced, and slain. Your howls echo in the gloom, but I do not fear you, for you have already taken everything I ever had.

My wife; my beloved. My daughter; our binsikhi, our little explorer. I call out their names, as I always do, to remind myself why it is that I fight. Then I raise my gauntlet.

For all your teeth and your claws and your ravenous rage, you cannot defeat me. Either I will strike you down, back to the pit… or you will send me into the hereafter, and I will finally be at peace. I will be with them once more.

Either way, I will win. No, you cannot defeat me, you who are shayatin, the beasts of the last infinity…

In my other hand, I clutch the stone tightly. Its foreign magic has kept me alive this long—long enough to delve far, far beneath the wastelands of old Icathia. It holds your corruption at bay, though at what cost to my flesh and my spirit, I cannot guess, for this smallest of trinkets now thrums in time with my own heart. That fearful rhythm is not the pulse of life, or magic, or any other wholesome thing, but of oblivion itself. Of that much, I am certain.

Back, beast. Stay back.

The Nether Blade snaps out from my gauntleted wrist, into the air between us.

Yes. Yes, you know this weapon, don’t you. You all remember it.

Where only moments ago you hungered for my flesh, now you are wary. Now you hesitate. You circle. Those of you that have eyes cannot take them from the blade’s shimmering edge. Even you must know, I think, that this thing was not made for mortal hands, or mortal souls. It was made by clever magic, by men who were no longer men, and who now are nothing at all. Would you remember them too, I wonder?

You screech and hiss, and stamp at the uneven ground. It would be easy to imagine that you hate all living things—but you do not hate us, I think. Not truly. You do not know what hate is.

Hate is the fire that burned in the immortal hearts of the god-warriors when they saw your kind spilling out into the world. Hate was what drove them against you, again and again, though they knew it would almost certainly be their doom…

Yes, this weapon remembers you. It remembers how to end you.

Horok, it was, that struck the first telling blow against your masters. Great and mighty Horok of the Ascended Host, whose name shall live forever. He is the Finder of Hidden Ways, and the One Who Follows After. It was Horok who first dared to face you down here, in the darkness, away from the light of the sun that had given him his strength. It was Horok who first bore the Nether Blade unto the Void’s vile heart.

And it was Horok who showed his brothers and sisters how to defeat the abyss.

I am no Ascended hero of Shurima, no god-warrior to be remembered in the grand halls of that ruined empire. I am but a man. I am a grieving father, and a child of the sai in my own time. From the dust I came, and to the dust I shall return soon enough.

But not yet. For now, I walk as Horok once walked, and I do this with his blade held out before—

The closest of you lunges. Horned shell and razor-sharp talons graze my side as I twist away, breath rasping through the pipes in my mask. For a moment I am blind, trapped inside this meager armored suit of my own devising.

Then I bring the Nether Blade up sharply, cleaving through what on any other creature could be called a neck.

The sinuous body crashes down, and I feel the weapon’s aching hunger in my sword arm, in the sourness at the back of my tongue, like the aftertaste of a scream. Who will be next? Which of you will try?

The desert knows Horok. His name shall live forever. Even when he was betrayed by the tyrant Ne’Zuk, to his death, none would claim the bladed gauntlet from Horok’s wrist. As far as the god-warriors had fallen, even they could not deny that these lands might be threatened by the Voidborn once again, in some unseen future, and this great weapon should be ready.

This is my land. Such horrors walk here now, openly, and I cannot allow it. I will plunge this blade into the creeping nothingness beneath Shurima, as I have a dozen times before.

Was it destiny? No. Nothing so noble as destiny. It was fated, I think, that I knew where this thing might be found. I led the echnebi treasure-seekers to Horok’s mausoleum on the banks of the Kahleek many years ago—back then I sought nothing more than their Piltovan gold, so that I might provide for my family. I gladly helped break open the tomb that had remained sealed for thousands of years. The Nether Blade was not the prize the echnebi sought, but they deemed it valuable all the same.

Some in the tribes called me mercenary. Some called me a traitor. All I know is, in the strange days since then, Horok’s mausoleum has been utterly consumed by the enemy. Were it not for those treasure-seekers and the bounty they paid me, this weapon would now be lost. Like my people. My family.

Unlike them, when the time came, the blade was something I could find again.

Kas sai a dyn. Whom does the desert know?

The desert does not know you, beast. You are not welcome here. You are lost in this ancient land of gods and men.

But the desert knows my name, for that is my name.

Not once have I lost my way. I know exactly where I am, and how many more paces it would be to the doom of all things. I will atone for what I have done, and that which I have not.

And I will defy you until the end.

Regardless of what he would later become, Varus was once a paragon of loyalty and honor. A skilled archer of the ancient Shuriman empire, he was appointed as a temple warden in the eastern states, and he held this duty sacred above all else.

During the earliest stages of the war with Icathia, even though it lay far from that cursed place, Varus’ homeland was attacked. While other wardens abandoned their posts to join the defense of the outlying villages, he alone remained, screaming in anguish with every arrow he loosed—for he had chosen to uphold his oaths rather than return home to protect his own family.

Emissaries from the Ascended Host found him kneeling in solemn meditation amid the corpses of his foes. It was said that his cold gaze unsettled even the god-warriors themselves, and yet, in recognition of his noble sacrifice, Varus was offered a place in their ranks.

As one of the great Ascended, he was utterly consumed by his pursuit of vengeance against the Icathians, and the voidling horrors they had unleashed. It is likely that Varus did not even fully comprehend Shurima’s ultimate victory in that war, so twisted had his mind become—nor the empire’s fall centuries later. Atrocity after atrocity blurred together, leaving him as a withdrawn, callous killer, reshaped and sent into battle countless times by his degenerate brethren.

Their name became feared throughout the known world.

The darkin.

Warring among themselves, they destroyed any other who stood against them. With his crystalline bow, Varus assassinated enemy commanders and champions, helping the darkin defeat entire mortal armies with ever greater ease.

Eventually, Varus was cornered by vastayan moon-stalkers and human mages in service of a golden-armored warrior queen of Valoran. They bound him within his bow, leaving him to howl in impotent rage. By then, the raw, corrupting influence of the darkin was known, and yet still the queen chose to wield the deadly weapon in the final days of the war, gladly sacrificing herself for a greater victory.

In the months that followed, the queen carried Varus to the First Lands—those that would later be known as Ionia. Now made monstrous by the bow’s power, her last act was to command her followers to bury her alive in a lightless well, sunk deep beneath a mountain temple overlooking the village of Pallas.

And there Varus was imprisoned, both by the natural magic of Ionia, and the ritual ministrations of the temple guardians.

The bow remained hidden for centuries, unknown, untouched, and all but forgotten, until Noxian invaders attacked the First Lands. Two beast hunters—Valmar and his heartlight, Kai—fought against the first wave at the Temple of Pallas. Though their courage was great and they drove off the attackers, Kai was mortally wounded, and a grief-stricken Val carried him inside, believing the well’s forbidden magic could restore him.

But the temple held only damnation, and both hunters were consumed by the unleashed power of the darkin within it. The very matter of their bodies was unraveled and bound together again to craft a new body, a body fit to free Varus from his imprisonment. What emerged from the well was a gestalt creature, pale and inhumanly beautiful, part human and part darkin. After more than a thousand years, Varus was reborn.

Even so, the human and darkin elements of this imperfect form are in constant flux, with each managing to wrest control for a short time before being reined in by the other. Varus fights to silence the two mortal souls once and for all, and wreak vengeance for the destruction of his race. Still, Kai and Val struggle against his malevolent influence, hoping against hope that their love can overcome the darkin’s hatred.

How long they can keep Varus conflicted is anyone’s guess—but should this sadistic and egotistical killer come to fully dominate his new host, it is certain he will seek to reunite with others of his kind, and reduce all of Runeterra to an ashen wasteland.

They came to a dead city in the mountain’s shadow under cover of night. Battle-hosts of a thousand warriors, each bearing bloody totems that told of the ancient lineages of the Sunborn Ascended who led them.

The city and the bones of its people had long ago become one with the desert, and it was impossible to tell ash and bone from sand. Only its tallest towers remained above the dunes: broken spires that sang mournfully when the winds blew from the realms beyond the mountain. Upon a broken plinth stood two trunkless legs of stone, the cruel visage of a half-buried avian head lying in the sand beside them.

In a long-distant age, an event of great moment had taken place in the valley where the city would later be built.

It had marked the beginning of Shurima.

And set in motion its ending.

None remembered that day, save the god-warriors who now led their hosts towards the city’s jutting ruins. Those same god-warriors had put the citizens to the sword in the wake of their emperor’s betrayal. And with its people murdered, they had seen the city burned and its name hacked from every stele and obelisk that remained standing.

Yet these acts of extermination were for naught but futile spite.

Futile because the child who had been taken as a slave from this city was long dead, and in life had no use for memory of his birth.

His act had destroyed the empire and sundered their brotherhood.

And so the god-warriors burned Nerimazeth, and its people, to ash.

The passage of deep time had stolen the golden scroll’s luster.

Much like us all, thought Ta’anari. He drew a clawed finger down the etched list of names and numbers, a meticulous record of tithes from the newly-established trading port of Kha’zhun in the north.

Newly-established...?

Kha’zhun had been a city of men for centuries, their savage tongue already debasing its name into something new and ugly. The Scholar might have found the scroll’s contents interesting, but the only worth it held for Ta’anari was the tangible link it provided to a time when the world made sense.

The room had once been a hall of records, its marble walls lined with shelves and stacked with scrolls recording tributes due to the emperor, accountings of his wars and long lists of his deeds. It had been a cavernous space, but the roof had caved in centuries ago, and sand filled most of the subterranean space.

He felt a change in the air, and looked up from his studies.

Myisha stood in the doorway, dwarfed by its dimensions, though Ta’anari’s black-furred skull would brush its lintel—were he still able to stand upright. Her frame was slight, fragile even, yet Ta’anari sensed she possessed depths not even he had fully grasped. Gold-blonde hair, like the men found in the cold north, spilled around her shoulders. Her features were youthful, but her eyes, one rich blue, the other twilight’s purple, held wisdom beyond her years. She wore thin silks, colorful and entirely unsuited to the desert, tied at the waist with a thin rope, from which hung a single golden key. A vivid pink scarf coiled around her neck, and she twisted its tasseled ends through her fingertips.

“They’re here,” she said.

“How many?”

“Nine hosts. Nearly ten thousand warriors.”

Ta’anari nodded, drawing his tongue over his yellowed fangs. “More than I expected.”

She shrugged and said, “They all need to be here.”

“Too much blood has been spilled over the centuries,” he said. “Too much hate unleashed. The idea that there could be peace between us is anathema to many of them.”

Myisha shook her head at such foolishness. “So many have already died in this endless war. You’ve managed to kill more of your kind than even the abyssal horrors did.”

A rebuke of her flippant tone died on Ta’anari’s thick tongue. She was right, after all.

And wasn’t that why he had summoned his kin?

“The moment Azir fell, a war between the Sunborn was inevitable,” said Ta’anari, putting aside the scroll, and rising from his study of ancient history. “With him gone, the scale of our ambitions was too great for any one of us to lead. So many visions of what the future needed to be, but all of us too broken to realize them.”

“Then perhaps you are not so different from mortals, after all.”

Once, he would have killed anyone who voiced such a thought, but the centuries of war and the colossal scale of the slaughter they had unleashed was testament to the truth of it.

Ta’anari had no clear recollection of Myisha entering his service. The lives of mortals were so fleeting, he barely noticed when one died and another took their place. But Myisha had drawn his notice more than any other. Her defiant insolence was part of it, but there was more to it than that. She had an insight into the minds of mortals that he and all his kind lacked since trading their humanity for greater power.

Ta’anari had last walked as a man so very long ago. He barely remembered the sensations of a mortal, or the awareness of time’s inexorable march. Ancient magic and the forge of the Sun Disc had remade him, wrought the crude matter of his mortal flesh into that of a god.

A flawed and broken god, but divine nonetheless.

His bronze-armored form had been panther-like, bowed by age and war, but still mighty. The fur of his upper body had once been lustrous black, but both his snout and limbs were threaded with grey, and he had reshaped himself as best he could. Ta’anari’s gaze had cowed entire armies, but one scarred socket now contained a cracked ruby, the other a slitted amber eye, rheumy with despair. His spine was twisted after an axe-blow taken during the Battle of the River Kahleek, a blow so ferocious that not even his fiery regenerative powers had been able to fully undo the damage.

He lifted a weapon from the table, a magnificent four-bladed Chalicar. He felt the perfect balance of its killing edges, but more than that, he felt the weight of expectation it embodied. He sighed and slung it in his shoulder harness before limping over to Myisha.

Even hunched by the ravages of time and old wounds, Ta’anari towered over her. The War of the Sunborn—though others were calling it a different, darker name—had exacted a grievous toll of lives on her kind, yet she had no fear of him.

Sometimes, he sensed a measure of pity from her.

At other times, a withering contempt.

She placed a tiny, hairless hand in his massive, pawed fist. “You are still a god-warrior, Ta’anari,” she said, “Remind them of what that once stood for, and you will win them over.”

“And if they don’t listen?”

She smiled. “Simple. You kill them all.”

His life-bearers were waiting for him in the sand-sunk antechamber. Once they had been queens and the rulers of mortal empires, but in the face of Ta’anari’s invincible warhost, they had pledged their swords to him.

Better to fight alongside a god-warrior than to be crushed by one.

Teushpa bowed as he approached, her muscular arms knotted with tattoos and banded with jade torques. Defiant, but loyal, she had been the last to offer her blood. Sulpae was desert-born with a lineage that reached back to the time before Azir’s father. She stamped her long spear at the sight of him. Her shaven scalp was scarified in a grid and pierced with gold beads at every ridged intersection.

Idri-Mi, proud and sturdy, held her long-hafted axe at her shoulder, its double-leafed blades heavier than most men could lift. She was a queen from the east whose mother and grandmother had fought for him. Her pale skin was like ivory, her long black hair hung with silver hooks.

Ta’anari stood before the three warrior women.

They were not his bodyguards; he had no need of lesser beings to protect him. Instead, they served as symbols of his will, how he could dominate proud warriors who wanted him dead, and were skilled enough that they might actually be able to hurt him.

His brothers and sisters of the fallen brotherhood would bring their life-bearers too, but none were so fierce as his.

Even so, none of the women looked him in the eye as he spoke. To meet the gaze of a god-warrior was to die.

“I have seen many life-bearers over the centuries of my existence, but you will be my last,” said Ta’anari. He scanned their faces for a reaction, but years of servitude had purged them of the weakness of emotion. They were as expressionless as the fallen statues littering the remains of the dead city. “I know this with complete certainty, as much from the patient gleam in your eyes as the nightmares that rip through my skull when Myisha’s elixirs wear off. You are all loyal, but you hunger for my death.”

Was that a flicker in the eye of Teushpa? Once, he would have gnawed the flesh from her bones at such a lapse in control, but his appetite for slaughter had waned over the centuries.

“I cannot blame you,” he continued. “What does my kind offer yours but death and horror? An age ago, the Sunborn saved this world at a terrible cost, but now we have brought it to the edge of ruin. The Ascended Host’s days of glory are long past, overshadowed by the darkness of our warring, and the all too fleeting memories of you mortals.”

Bitterness tainted the last of his words, tempered only by the knowledge that he and his brethren had brought this upon themselves. Overweening pride, war-damaged psyches, and ancient feuds alloyed to forge the blade that sundered their chains of duty.

Ta’anari let out a shuddering breath. For over a thousand years he had fought against this moment, but now it was upon him, he knew death was nothing to be feared.

“If you live through this night, you will greet the dawn free. When the sun rises, return to your people and tell them what you saw and heard here.” He turned away. “Myisha, is everything prepared?”

“Yes. They’re waiting in the amphitheater.”

Ta’anari nodded. “Then let us end this.”

The space had not been designed as an amphitheater. It had served as Nerimazeth’s marketplace, but Ta’anari’s slaves had carved it from the desert’s embrace, and his magic had shaped it with heat so intense that it vitrified the sand. Now it was an arena of blown glass; a caldera of smoky black, sea green and numinous iridescence. Its surfaces captured the soft moonlight and reflected it back in floating veils of silver.

Ta’anari entered through a sweeping arch shaped like a frozen instant in the life of an ocean wave. Tension thickened the air, as was only to be expected when the gods gathered their battle-hosts.

Ten thousand men and women filled the tiered heights of the amphitheater, the champions of the god-warriors assembled below. No blades were bared, but all were ready to unleash an orgy of slaughter at their liege’s command.

Ta’anari swept his gaze around his fellow Sunborn—brothers and sisters once united by unbreakable bonds of love and duty that were, in time, revealed to be as brittle as glass. Unimaginable power had wrought their bodies, drawn from a realm beyond comprehension to sculpt their mortal flesh in ways none living now could recreate.

But our minds are still mortal, he thought, and shockingly weak.

Syphax’s gaze offered understanding. Zigantus radiated disgust. Xuuyan seethed with outright contempt. It had been Xuuyan’s axe that crippled Ta’anari at Kahleek. The chelonian-headed god-warrior spat on the ground as Ta’anari limped to the center of the amphitheater.

Shabaka and Shabake, the raven-feathered seer twins, did not even look up, too engrossed in casting auguries with scrimshawed fingerbones. Valeeva watched Ta’anari with the same haughty disdain that her brother always did—the one member of their sundered fellowship he was relieved had not attended.

Cebotaru the Wolf paced back and forth, impatient to be done with this conclave. His battle-hosts ravaged the far north, and the lands over the western seas. Of all of them, Cebotaru was closest to breaking the bloody stalemate.

Naganeka of Zuretta watched from within her hooded cowl, a long scaled robe draped over the coiled length of her body. Her venom blinded life-bearers stood ready to convey her words, should she actually deign to utter any. None of them had heard her sibilant whispers in over five hundred years.

Only Enakai offered respect. He came forward, his skin patterned with new, vivid stripes of orange and black. Where Ta’anari was bent and bowed, Enakai wore his great age with pride, eyes undimmed, and strength unbroken by the long ages he had made war. Long ago, they had climbed the golden steps to the sun-disc together, hand-in-hand as its searing light infused them with celestial power. Enakai had borne Ta’anari’s wounded body on the retreat from Icathia, fought as his brother in the mud at Kahleek, and faced him as an enemy at the Glacier Port.

Live as long as we do, and the wheel will turn many times.

Enakai took Ta’anari’s paw in his. “Ta’anari.”

“Enakai.”

No more needed to be said. The span of many lifetimes’ worth of experience, joy, loss and heartache were contained in their exchange of names. They were beings raised up as gods. Inconsequential words were beneath them.

Enakai’s eyes narrowed as he caught sight of the weapon slung behind Ta’anari’s back. He opened his mouth to speak, but Ta’anari gave an imperceptible shake of his head.

“I hope you know what you are doing,” Enakai murmured, returning to his place at the edge of the amphitheater.

Ta’anari took a breath; he had rehearsed this moment many times over the years, understanding that a single wrong word could end this before it began. His kin were god-warriors, and had all the haughty arrogance and quick temper common to beings of such ego.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said, the magically crafted acoustics carrying his words throughout the amphitheater. “Such a gathering of the Sunborn has not happened since the drawing of the thousand before the walls of Parnesa.”

He saw nods, that vivid memory stirring the dimmed embers in their souls of what they had once been.

Now build on that. Speak as if to each one of them.

“I look around, and I see power,” he continued, every word delivered with passion and belief. “I see gods where once walked mortals—beings of noble aspect, mighty and worthy of devotion. Some call our ancient brotherhood sundered. They use the ancient tongue to name us darkin, but to see you here gives the lie to that word.”

Ta’anari paused, letting his flattery wash over them. It would be empty to most, for choirs of tortured subjects sang praises day and night to them... on pain of death.

But it might open enough of the rest for them to be won over.

“You all remember when we marched shoulder to shoulder, when Setaka led our Ascended Host to push the emperor’s realm to the very edges of the world. I know I remember it well. It was an age of glory, an age of heroes! Cebotaru, you and I rode dragons of twilight to the piercing summit of the world, where all time is as one, and witnessed the creation of the universe.”

He turned, and held a hand out to Syphax.

“Syphax, my brother, we waged war on the abyssal monsters when they poured from the ocean rift on the eastern coast. We fought for ten days and nights, to the very limits of endurance, but we drove them back. We triumphed!”

Syphax nodded, and Ta’anari saw the memory of that war ripple through his scaled flesh in waves of purple, black and red.

“I do not speak of that time,” said Syphax, his many eyes veiled in smoke. “Seven thousand golden warriors of Shurima died on the red shore. Only you and I returned alive.”

“Yes, we paid a terrible price for that victory, brother—in flesh and in spirit. But what a fight it was! Mortals renamed the ocean in honor of our deeds that day.”

Syphax shook his head. “Your memory has omitted the horrors we saw that day, Ta’anari. Keep your talk of glory. I’ll not hear it. When I close my eyes, I still hear the screams of those we lost. I relive how those... things killed them. Worse, how they wiped them from the world, and devoured their very souls. So spare me your gilded recollections, I do not recognize them.”

“Yes, they were days of blood and, yes, it is likely I glorify them,” said Ta’anari. “But I speak of how the world should know us and remember us. As mighty heroes, bestriding the world at the head of invincible armies and commanded by an undying emperor who—”

“But Azir did die,” snapped Xuuyan, planting his mighty long-axe hard enough to crack the glass beneath. “He died, and without him at our head, the Sunborn fell to war. What went before is now dust and ashes. It is meaningless. So if you think reminding us of golden memories will end this conflict, then you have fallen further into madness than any of us.”

“Reminding us all of what we once were is only part of my reason for bringing you here,” said Ta’anari.

“Then state your purpose, or let us get back to killing one another.”

Ta’anari tried to stand upright, but failed when the twisted bones in his back creaked like a bent branch. Pain shot up his spine like the raking claws of a Void-born terror.

“It is the old wound, Xuuyan,” he said. “It never really healed. You remember, at Kahleek?”

“Of course I remember, cripple,” snarled Xuuyan. “I remember every blow I have struck from the moment I stepped from the light of the great disc. There are none of us here who cannot speak of great deeds or betrayals at the side of those we once called brothers and sisters.”

“You and I, we held the line where Icathia once stood. You saved my life more than once.”

“Those days are gone now,” snapped Cebotaru, the words mangled by the growing disfigurement of his jaw. “And in the past they must remain.”

“Why?” Ta’anari demanded, rounding on him. “Why must they remain in the past? Are we not the Ascended of Shurima? We are not mere avatars, we are gods! What is reality, but what we decide it should be? Any one of us could rule this world entirely, but instead we have fallen to petty squabbling, waging wars for reasons that no longer make sense, even to the few of us that could still name them.”

He paced, his tone hectoring and judgemental, despite himself.

“Zigantus, you believed we should rebuild from the ruins, to continue Azir’s legacy. Enakai, you sought to establish a new kingdom. Valeeva, you and your brother saw spite in every eye, and sought vengeance for slights real and imagined.”

“Oh, they were real,” she hissed, her alabaster skin threaded with violet veins and her venomous spines standing erect at her shoulders.

Ta’anari ignored her. “Each of us saw a different path into the future, but instead of using our Sunborn powers and working together to achieve something divine, we fought like scavengers over a fresh corpse. Yes, Setaka was long dead, and we will never see her like again. Yes, Azir was betrayed, and our empire lay in ruins, its people scattered and frightened. Shurima needed a strong leader to guide its rebirth, but all it was left with was us, broken monsters who had stared into the abyss too long and felt its horror twist their minds to madness and self-destruction.

“So instead of rebuilding, we fought for the scraps of a dead empire, while burning the rest of the world to the ground. Even now, we would sooner see the extinction of all life rather than find common purpose. Alone we are mighty, but together...? There is nothing we cannot do. Nothing. If we wanted, we could storm the celestial gates, leave this ashen world behind, and forge a new empire beyond the stars!”

Ta’anari’s voice dropped, laden with regret.

“But we do not. We do what lesser beings do. We kill each other in a war that has lasted many times longer than any we fought before.”

And then his voice rose, soaring to far reaches of the amphitheater.

“But it does not have to be that way, not any more!”

Ta’anari reached back over his shoulder and unslung the Chalicar. A murmur of shock rippled around the amphitheater at the sight of the ancient weapon.

“You all remember this,” he said. “It is the weapon of Setaka, greatest and noblest of us all. Brought from beyond the mountain and raised aloft at Shurima’s birth. It is the blade that will one day be borne by Sivunas Alahair, the Bringer of Rains. In their hands it will be a weapon of great destruction, or a symbol of unity.”

He held out the Chalicar for his fellows to see. Its edges glittered gold, shaped by cosmic forces beyond this world by powers not even the wisest of Shurima understood. Ta’anari saw their reverence, their awe and pride.

But most of all he saw their desire to possess it. Xuuyan took a step towards him.

Of course it would be Xuuyan.

The god-warrior spun his axe, and Ta’anari remembered the awful pain of its obsidian blade splitting his armor and smashing his spine to shards.

“I will kill you and take it from your dead hand,” said Xuuyan, a wide grin splitting his beaked skull. “Will that make me the leader?” His chitinous carapace bulged at his shoulders, studded with outgrowths of bone spikes and iron blades. Even in his prime, Ta’anari could not best him.

But Kahleek was many centuries ago, and Ta’anari had learned new tricks since then.

“Are you going to fight me with that?” Xuuyan asked, pointing to the Chalicar with his axe.

“No,” said Ta’anari, turning to hand it to Myisha.

Its weight was almost too much for her to bear, but she winked and again he sensed capricious amusement from her, as though the sight of gods about to fight was amusing to her.

Xuuyan sneered. “Then what? You will face me unarmed? Is that what this is? You want to die here, in the sight of your fellow gods?”

“Not that either.”

“No matter, I care nothing for your reasons,” said Xuuyan, “I will finish what I began at the river.”

His charge was like an avalanche—a rumbling, inexorable thunder that was as deadly as it was inescapable. Ta’anari had seen entire phalanxes broken by it, giants toppled and fortress gates smashed asunder.

Ta’anari dropped to one knee and placed his hands flat against the amphitheater’s glassy floor. He felt currents of magic running through its structure, golden threads of power linking him to every living being that stood upon it. The mortals were like tiny sparks rising from a fire, fleeting and inconsequential, but the god-warriors were newborn suns of roiling magic.

He tapped into their power, just as Myisha had taught him. He drew out a measure of the cursed prescience of Shabaka and Shabake, feeling their alien senses twist within him. The lizard-swiftness of Syphax surged through his ancient body. The rage of Zigantus, and Enakai’s sense of righteous purpose.

Ta’anari closed his eye, now knowing where Xuuyan’s charging blow would land.

He swayed aside, the blade slashing a hair’s breadth from his throat. Xuuyan’s passing was like a thunderstrike, and Ta’anari swung around, grasping one of his attacker’s curling shell-horns. He vaulted onto Xuuyan’s back as his former brother roared in fury.

The god-warrior rolled, trying to throw Ta’anari, but his grip was too tight. The seer twins’ unwitting gift allowed Ta’anari to anticipate every wild, bucking move his foe made. Xuuyan reversed his grip on the axe and swung it over his shoulder like the barbed whip of a lunatic penitent. Ta’anari rolled aside as the blade smashed down, cleaving a deep and gory trough in Xuuyan’s unnatural armor.

The Sunborn bellowed in anger, wrenching the blade from his hardened flesh in a welter of blood. One of his horns hung by sinewy threads, and Ta’anari ripped it from the carapace. Ivory white and curved like a scimitar, its tip was sheathed in iron, and needle-sharp.

Xuuyan slammed into the wall of the amphitheater with a hammering impact that smashed it to spinning fragments of razored glass. Scores of mortal bodies tumbled into the arena, only to be crushed underfoot by the struggling god-warriors. Xuuyan hurled Ta’anari from his back. He landed hard on the ground, still clutching the sharpened horn.

Xuuyan turned and swung his axe down in an executioner’s strike, but Ta’anari dove aside, and the floor exploded in knives of glass. Instead, Xuuyan’s gnarled foot stomped down on his chest, pinning him to the floor. He felt his ribs crack, a shard punching through into his lung. The weight was colossal, easily capable of crushing him like an insect.

“The Chalicar will be mine!” Xuuyan shouted.

The god-warrior’s leathery, helmet-like skull extended from his armored carapace, his neck pale and thick with pulsing arteries. Soulless black eyes bulged at the promise of slaying yet another rival. As he’d promised, Xuuyan meant to finish what he had begun on the banks of the River Kahleek.

“No,” grunted Ta’anari through blood-flecked fangs. “It won’t.”

He unleashed a surge of newly-learned power, unknown to the rest of his kind. He blinked—a terrible sensation of hurtling through an unending vortex overcame him, a tunnel surrounded by hideous monsters that lurked just beyond the threshold...

The sensation lasted a fraction of a second only, but felt like an age.

He opened his eyes, and he was once again atop Xuuyan as the deadly axe arced towards the ground. A hard bang of displaced air echoed behind him as the fleeting portal closed.

Ta’anari raised the bloody horn high overhead, and plunged it down into Xuuyan’s eye.

The tip punched deep into the god-warrior’s skull, Ta’anari’s inhuman strength driving the entire length of the horn into the mass of Xuuyan’s brain.

It was a ferocious killing blow, but Xuuyan still stood, his Ascended flesh not quite ready to admit that it was dead. Ta’anari leapt clear as the towering god-warrior crashed to his knees with the sound of a mountain toppling. Xuuyan rolled onto his side, his remaining eye staring at his killer with mute incomprehension. His beaked mouth still moved, but no words came out.

Ta’anari gulped in breaths that heaved in his blood-frothed lungs. He heard Myisha squeal with delight, clapping like a proud teacher pleased at a student’s wild success.

The sound sickened him.

Even if things had gone exactly as planned, he’d suspected he would have to kill at least one of his brethren. But he had not relished the prospect. He and Xuuyan had never been close, but they had fought side by side for the glory of Shurima, back when the sun blessed them, and filled their bodies with strength.

He knelt beside his fallen opponent and laid a furred hand on his head. Blood glistened with the light of dragon-wrought stars. “I am truly sorry, brother,” he whispered.

A roar of anguish went up from Xuuyan’s champions. Not in mourning for their fallen god—Xuuyan was too hated for that—nor even in hunger for vengeance. The roar was for their own forfeit lives. Murderous blades slipped from the sheaths of the warbands to either side of them.

The god-warriors had taught their slaves well.

Men without a god to protect them were nothing more than vermin to be exterminated, or so the teachings had always been.

“Hold!” shouted Ta’anari. “Champions, stay your blades!”

These warbands were not his; but he was Sunborn, and the awesome authority in his voice halted them in their tracks. His fellow god-warriors stared in open-mouthed wonder at what Ta’anari had done. Naganeka of Zuretta slid forward, and lowered her upper body to study Xuuyan’s cooling corpse. Pale smoke was lifting from his flesh, celestial energies already fleeing the mortal meat of his body.

She pulled back her hooded cowl, revealing her many hypnotic eyes rimmed with ash, and scaled lips overhung by long, ebony fangs. She bent over the wound in Xuuyan’s back, and her tongue flicked out to taste his death.

“Rhaast will be disappointed,” she said, her voice a wet, reptile hiss. “He had sworn to slay Xuuyan himself.” Her venom blinded life-bearers shuffled behind her, unsure of what to do now that their reviled goddess had spoken aloud.

The others came forward warily. Enakai and Syfax watched Ta’anari with newfound respect. The others fixated on Xuuyan’s death, but they had seen Ta’anari do something impossible, even for a god-warrior.

Shabaka and Shabake circled the corpse. Their stunted wings fluttered in agitation. They wore the smell of death like a shroud—the corruption that touched them all was most obvious in those two.

Onyx eyes, eyes that had seen too much, darted back and forth. “Told him he would die today, didn’t we, sister?” said Shabaka.

“They never listen, do they?” Shabake replied.

Shabaka giggled. “No, no, never listen to the mad ravens. What do we know? Only everything!”

“You foresaw this?” demanded Zigantus.

“Yes, yes, saw him get too close a look at that horn of his. Told him so, but he just laughed.”

“Not laughing now, is he, brother?”

“No, sister.”

“What else have you seen?” asked Syphax.

The seer twins huddled together, whispering and tossing the small bones back and forth between them. Their minds had been shattered during the battle to seal the Great Rift at Icathia. No one, not even a god-warrior, could meet the gaze of the titanic entities who watched and dwelled within the Abyss without their sanity unravelling a little.

Shabake frowned. “Future too tightly woven to know...”

“And too many possible outcomes from the now to see any clearly,” Shabaka added. “Not for sure.”

“All of us may die today. Or just some,” said Shabake. “Or maybe none. Maybe you kill Ta’anari now, Zigantus, and we all get to live.”

“Live to kill each other another day!” cackled Shabaka.

“She wants it. She is the pebble that starts the avalanche.”

“Speak plainly!” demanded Zigantus. “Who wants what? Pebbles? Avalanches? Who are you talking about?”

“Her!” screeched Shabaka, pointing past Ta’anari to the slight figure of Myisha. “She is the mote-light in the eye of the gods.”

Myisha held the Chalicar tight to her chest, like a child clutching her father’s blade.

Cebotaru snarled and hauled Ta’anari to his feet. The Wolf’s physique was slender, yet monstrously powerful and wrought with four sinewy, grey-furred arms curled into clawed fists. “What are they talking about?” he growled. “That one, who is she?”

Ta’anari bit back a scream of pain as the twisted bones of his spine ground together. “She is a mortal, nothing more,” he said.

“You always were a miserable liar,” said Cebotaru, baring long, crooked fangs. “The truth, brother, or I will rip your throat out before you can blink.”

“She helped me find the Chalicar,” said Ta’anari.

Cebotaru shook his head. “The Scholar buried the Chalicar with Setaka when he took her body into hiding, after the doom of Icathia. How is it that a mere mortal knew where to find it?”

“She did not, but she led me to Nasus.”

The others forgot Xuuyan, and turned their attention on Ta’anari.

“You saw the Scholar?” said Valeeva, the spines on her back rippling with anticipation. “No one has seen him since he killed Moneerah for delving the charred ruins of Nashramae’s great library.”

“I saw him, but he is much changed since we last knew him. Whatever burden he bears has all but crushed him. He dwells at a tower raised on a hidden cliff, watching the dance of stars. He bade her find me, and bring me to his tower.”

“Why you?” hissed Naganeka. “Why not any of us?”

“I do not know,” said Ta’anari. “There are many more deserving of his attention.”

“And you spoke to him?” asked Enakai.

“I did,” said Ta’anari.

“And he told you where to find Setaka’s blade?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?” spat Syphax.

“No, not just like that,” Ta’anari snapped, throwing off Cebotaru’s grip. He turned to retrieve the Chalicar from Myisha. The power within the weapon was potent and restless. “I told him of our war, of how we were burning paradise and clawing at one another like animals. I told him I needed the weapon of Setaka to end this bloodshed.”

“Nasus rejected us the moment Azir fell,” said Zigantus. “Why would he help now?”

“He rejected the Sunborn, because he saw the bitter jealousies and twisted rivalries that fester in our hearts,” said Ta’anari. “He has been walking the forgotten paths of this world, wracked by grief and adrift in memories of his lost brother, but always he is drawn back to the land of his birth.”

Ta’anari took a breath, grimacing as he felt the currents of magic shifting within him. Sharp pain stabbed up into his heart from his belly.

So, the end begins...

Myisha had warned that using the magic she had taught him would irrevocably change even an Ascended, breaking the fetters that bound the immortal breath of the gods to his human flesh. That power had held the hurts of endless battle and the passage of millennia at bay, but some things were never meant to live forever.

Fear touched him then, cold and unfamiliar, but he fought down the creeping tide of pain and weakness.

“You are right, Zigantus. Nasus will never fight in our war, but that does not mean he is heedless of what we do. He told me the stars speak of a time far in the future when Shurima will rise from the sands once more, when the rightful ruler will fight to claim dominion over all that has been lost.”

“Shurima will rise again?” said Cebotaru, unable to mask his eagerness. “When?”

“We will not live to see it,” said Ta’anari. “Not all of us.”

Shabake pushed her scrawny, skittering form between them. Her withered arms stabbed the air, her dark eyes wide. “All of us may die today. Or just some,” she screeched.

Syphax pushed her away. “The Chalicar,” he said. “It will play a part in Shurima’s rebirth?”

“Yes,” said Ta’anari. “For good or ill. It will be a symbol for the people of Shurima to rally behind. I had hoped it could heal the wounds between us—a reminder of what we once were, and what we could be again. It could have saved us if we had taken the chance to reclaim the brotherhood that once bound us together under a single banner.”

Cebotaru grunted in amusement. “And now the truth of it comes out. You gathered us here to claim the right of leadership, bearing the weapon of our greatest champion, and anointed by the Scholar himself.”

Ta’anari shook his furred head.

“No, I could never be the equal of Setaka, or Nasus. All I sought was an end to this war. I had hoped we could do it together, but I see now that was an impossible dream.”

Ta’anari walked away from his brethren, moving to stand in the centre of the amphitheater. All eyes were upon him, eight god-warriors and thousands of mortals.

The pain was spreading all through him, almost too much to bear. He swallowed, tasting the grit of sand in the back of his throat. Fur was drifting free from his body in wispy clumps. Every movement felt like broken glass was grinding in his joints.

He turned to address the others.

“Power without check made us vain, made us believe that nothing should be denied us. That made us poor stewards of his world, and we do not deserve to be its masters. We once called ourselves the Ascended Host. What are we now? Darkin? A name debased by mortals who no longer understand what we are, or what we were wrought to do.”

He lifted his fading eye to the thousands watching from the steps of the amphitheater, tears cutting a path through his flaking skin.

“They hate us, and when the horrors of the abyss rise once more, they will beg for our return,” said Ta’anari, meeting Myisha’s eager gaze. “But we will be gone, no more than whispers on the songwinds, a dark legend of imperfect gods told to scold disobedient children.”

With the last of his strength, Ta’anari rammed the Chalicar down into the crystalline floor of the amphitheater. The sound was deafening, like a hammerblow against the veil of the world. The cracks from its impact spread farther than they should have, and the clear sky burned with the diamond brilliance of a newborn star.

But this was no golden radiance. This was cold, merciless and silver.

“What the sun made, the moon will unmake!” screamed Ta’anari.

And a blazing column of white fire stabbed from the midnight sky.

It struck the Chalicar’s extended arms and reflected that fire outwards, drawing in the god-warriors and piercing their chests. It burned them, reached into the arcane heart of their being and devoured the magic that made them.

Shabaka and Shabake vaporized instantly, disappearing in an ashen cloud of drifting feathers. Their screams were cackles of release, freighted with resigned foreknowledge.

Syphax twisted in the light like a hooked fish, but even his power was meaningless in the face of this cosmic fire. The bull-headed Zigantus tried to run, but not even his legendary speed could outrun the moonfall called down by Ta’anari.

Even as his skin sloughed from his bones, Ta’anari wept to see them die. They were his brothers and sisters, and not even centuries of the most brutal war imaginable could make him hate them.

He saw Enakai unmade by the radiance, his divine flesh dissolving into light from his bones. He reached for Ta’anari, and his eyes were accepting as he met his fate.

He sobbed at what he had been forced to do.

The light burned away his remaining eye, and a world of darkness closed in on him. The last of his strength fled his body and he slumped to the glass floor of the amphitheater. He heard more screams and the shouts of fighting men who knew nothing of the affairs of gods. More bloodshed, but it would pass.

Would the mortal hosts continue the war his kind had begun?

Perhaps. But it would be a mortal war, and it would end.

Ta’anari drifted in darkness, lost in memories of happier days.

He tried to recall his life before climbing the golden steps to meet the sun with Enakai. Little remained of that time, the memories shed as the heavenly power had crowded his skull.

Ta’anari heard footsteps. Booted feet crunching over broken glass. He smelled mortal flesh, rank with sweat and decay.

They were smells he recognised. His life-bearers.

Ta’anari lifted a hand, seeking the touch of another living being, but no one took it.

“Sulpae?” he croaked. “Is that you? Teushpa? Idri-Mi? Please, help me. I think... I think I am mortal once more, I... I think I am human again...”

“You are,” said a voice that seemed on the verge of laughter.

“Myisha,” whispered Ta’anari. “Are they all dead?”

“No. Naganeka, Valeeva and Cebotaru escaped before the fire could take them. But they’re pretty weak, so I don’t think they’ll be a problem for long. It’s the others, all those who didn’t show up, who’ll be harder to trap.”

“No! You must finish them,” wheezed Ta’anari. “Even a wounded god-warrior could conquer this world.”

“Trust me,” said Myisha, “what we did here spells the beginning of the end for your kind.”

“Then we did it. We brought peace.”

Then she really did laugh. “Peace? Oh, no—this world will never know peace. Not really.”

Confused, Ta’anari struggled to rise, but the hard jab of a spear butt to the chest pushed him back.

“No, you stay down there,” said Myisha.

“Please, help me up,” he said. “I told you, I am human now.”

“I heard you, but do you imagine that fact washes away your multitude of sins? Think of all the lives you ended. Does being human now mean you’re forgiven for the oceans of blood you spilled? Tell me, how many atrocities did it take before your withered conscience finally pricked you enough to act?”

“I don’t understand,” Ta’anari murmured. “What are you saying?”

Myisha giggled, and she suddenly seemed so much younger to him, yet impossibly ancient too. He heard the cracking sound of the Chalicar being pulled from the amphitheater floor.

“I am saying that your death has been a long time coming, Ta’anari,” said Myisha. “Some of you turned out not so bad, I suppose, but most of you were so damaged in the war with the Void, it’s a wonder you survived this long. Perhaps you and your kind were a mistake to begin with, but a mistake I can help correct.”

Even without eyes, Ta’anari felt the golden power of the Chalicar hovering just above him. Though his body was withered and all but spent, he cried out in agony as its edge split his chest.

Myisha whispered into his ear. “The power that coursed through this weapon touched you all, Ta’anari. It knows your kind now. And I give that fire to mortals.”

Her hands were inside him, and Ta’anari felt his heart being cut away, felt it being lifted from the cage of his cloven ribs... yet, still, he lived.

For a few moments more, at least.

“Idri-Mi,” she said, handing off Ta’anari’s heart, “take this and the Chalicar to your weaponsmiths. We will need to take a different approach in dealing with the rest of the...”

Myisha paused.

“Wait, what was that old word?”

She snapped her fingers.

“Ah, yes. That’s it. Darkin.”

The appearance of a comet in the night sky is often said to portend upheaval and unrest. Under the auspices of such fiery harbingers, new empires rise, old cultures fall, and even the stars themselves may vanish from the heavens…

The truth is, perhaps, more unsettling.

The almighty being known as Aurelion Sol was already ancient before the rise of the mortal races of Runeterra. Born in the first breath of creation, he and those like him roamed the vast nothingness of a pristine celestial realm, seeking to fill this canvas of incalculable breadth with marvels whose twinkling spectra would bring fulfillment and delight to all who witnessed them.

As he wandered, Aurelion Sol seldom encountered any equals. The eternal Aspects were dispassionate and incurious things, contributing little to existence, content only to compose amusingly self-centered philosophies on the nature of creation.

But then, bathed in the light of a fairly unremarkable sun he had crafted eons earlier, he discovered something. A world. New realms.

He did not know who had created this world, or why—only that it had not been him.

The Aspects, who seemed unusually invested in it, implored him to come closer. There was life here, and magic, and fledgling civilizations that cried out for guidance from beings greater than themselves. Flattered by this new audience to his supreme majesty, Aurelion Sol descended to bask in their adulation, in the form of a vast and terrible dragon from the stars.

The tiny inhabitants of the insignificant land of Targon named him for the golden light of the sun he had gifted them, and the Aspects commanded them to bring forth a suitable offering in return. The mortals climbed to the peak of their tallest mountain, and presented him with a splendorous crown, crafted with careful and cunning magic, and etched with the inscrutable patterns of the celestial realm.

From the moment it touched Aurelion Sol’s brow, he knew this was no gift at all.

The accursed thing clamped in place with unimaginable force, enough that even he could not remove it, and he could feel his knowledge of the sun and its creation being stolen and scrutinized by intelligences vastly inferior to his own. Worse still, the power of the crown hurled him back into the heavens, and prevented him from getting any closer to that world again.

Instead, he was forced to watch as the duplicitous Aspects of Targon set the mortals to work in the construction of a great, gleaming disc. With this, they channeled his celestial power to raise up immortal god-warriors, for some unknown conflict that was apparently still to come.

Outraged, Aurelion Sol could see other stars fading across the firmament for lack of care and maintenance, and he strained to break free of the crown’s control. It was he who had birthed their light into the universe! Why must he be shackled, now, by the Aspects and their lowly pawns? He roared with glee when the Sun Disc failed… only to see a second, more powerful one take its place. Eventually, resigned to his fate, he saw the god-warriors cast down their rivals, then chittering creatures of pure darkness, and eventually each other.

Then, in little more than the blink of a star dragon’s eye, the world was ravaged by a succession of sorcerous catastrophes, and Aurelion Sol finally knew that Targon and the hated Aspects were all but defenseless. As he cautiously circled back, he realized the magic that bound him was weakening. Flecks of gold began to fall from his crown, each one blazing across the skies like a comet.

Driven by the tantalizing possibilities of freedom and revenge, Aurelion Sol now regards Runeterra with simmering, eternal fury. Surely, it is here, upon this world, that the cosmic balance will tip in his favor once more—and with it, the universe itself shall bear witness to the fate of those who dare steal the power of a star forger.

Renekton was born to fight. From a young age, it was obvious he had no fear, regularly brawling with much older children. It was usually his pride that led to these confrontations—Renekton was unable to back down, or let any insult pass. While his older brother, Nasus, disapproved of his street-fighting, Renekton relished it.

Nasus eventually left to join the prestigious Collegium of the Sun, and Renekton’s skirmishes became more serious. Fearing his brother’s violent nature would see him imprisoned or in an early grave, Nasus helped him enlist in the Shuriman army. Officially, Renekton was too young, but Nasus made sure this was conveniently overlooked.

The discipline of military life was a blessing. Renekton fought in numerous wars of conquest to expand the empire—his ferocity and toughness were still evident, but his honor and bravery became renowned. Nasus, now a celebrated general and tactician, would often say that he planned many great battles, but it was Renekton who won them.

Indeed, after saving the isolated city of Zuretta, Renekton was made a captain by the emperor himself, and named Gatekeeper of Shurima. Outnumbered ten to one, he and a small contingent had faced the enemy in the remote, rocky passes to the south, to buy time for the city to be evacuated. It was a battle none had expected Renekton to survive, let alone win... yet he held out long enough for a relief force led by Nasus to arrive, and the invading forces were routed.

Through decades of service, Renekton’s reputation came to rival even the god-warriors of the Ascended Host, his presence on the battlefield an inspiration to those fighting alongside him, and terrifying to his foes. Still, he was a grizzled and battle-scarred veteran of middling years when word reached him that his brother was close to death.

He raced back to the capital to find Nasus a pale shadow of his former self, having been struck down by a debilitating wasting malady. The sickness was incurable.

Nevertheless, the general’s greatness was recognized by one and all. Beyond his military acumen, Nasus had curated the empire’s great libraries, and compiled or translated many of the finest literary works of antiquity. Such a man could not be allowed to pass, and it was decreed that he was worthy of Ascension.

The whole city gathered in witness, but Nasus no longer had the strength to climb onto the dais before the Sun Disc. Without thought for his own safety, Renekton lifted his brother in his arms, and climbed the final steps, fully expecting to be obliterated in the process. He was just a warrior, after all, and he knew Shurima would need Nasus in the years to come.

However, Renekton was not destroyed. Beneath the blinding radiance of the Sun Disc, both brothers were raised up and remade, and when the light faded, two mighty god-warriors stood before the crowds—Nasus in his lean, jackal-headed body, and Renekton as an immense reptile. The jackal was often regarded as the most clever and cunning of beasts, and the fearless aggression of the crocodile fit Renekton perfectly.

Renekton had been a mighty hero before, but now he possessed power beyond mortal understanding. He led Shurima’s armies to many bloody victories, neither giving nor expecting any mercy. His legend spread far beyond the borders of the empire, and it was his enemies that knew him as “the Butcher of the Sands”, a title he embraced.

But there were some—Nasus among them—who came to believe that a portion of Renekton’s humanity had been lost in his transformation. He seemed crueler, taking ever greater pleasure in the spilling of blood, and there were whispers of many battlefield atrocities. Nevertheless, he remained a staunch defender of Shurima, faithfully serving a succession of emperors, even through the rebellion of Icathia and the horrifying war that followed.

Some years later, it was decided that the young emperor Azir would join the ranks of the Ascended Host, and become the immortal ruler his people deserved.

The results were catastrophic.

Renekton and Nasus were each more than a day’s journey from the capital when it happened, and they arrived to find the glorious city in ruins. The Sun Disc was failing, drained of all its power. At the center of the carnage, they found the emperor’s treacherous magus, Xerath—now a malevolent being of pure energy.

The brothers fought hard, but knowing that they could not destroy Xerath, Renekton finally wrestled him into the Tomb of the Emperors beneath the city, and bade his brother seal them inside. Knowing there was no other way, Nasus reluctantly did as his brother ordered.

Xerath and Renekton continued their battle. For uncounted centuries they stalked one another through the lightless depths, as the once-great civilization of Shurima turned to dust in the world above. Xerath taunted his adversary, whispering poison in Renekton’s ear, and gradually, his viperous words began to take hold. He convinced Renekton that Nasus, jealous of his success, had leapt at the chance to be rid of him, and enjoy immortality alone.

Piece by piece, Renekton’s sanity cracked. Xerath drove a wedge into these cracks, twisting his perception of what was real and what was imagined. When the Tomb of the Emperors was finally opened by greedy mortal scavengers, Renekton roared his fury and thundered out into the desert, sniffing the air for his brother’s scent.

But Shurima has changed much in his absence. The Ascended Host is no more, leaving the people scattered and leaderless, for the most part. Though he cares little for such things, Renekton has attracted followers among the most fierce and bloodthirsty of the desert raiders... even if he cannot always tell friend from foe in his frequent, deranged frenzies.

And while there are moments when he resembles the proud, honorable hero of the past, most often Renekton is little more than a devolved, hate-maddened beast, driven on by the thirst for blood and vengeance.

A master of ancient, forbidden sorcery, Vladimir is among the oldest enigmas of Noxus. He was present at the dawn of the empire, and has since woven his influence deep into its foundations… but he remembers little of those days. His mind is mortal, and so most of his unnaturally extended life endures not in his memory, but in his chronicles.

History has lost track of Vladimir on many occasions, though its pages are littered with figures suspected to have been him. Legend once told of a prince in a kingdom threatened by the infamous darkin, as their great war spilled into Valoran. With his father’s crown at stake, and many more heirs ahead of him in the line of succession, the unfortunate youth was traded to the fallen god-warriors as a hostage.

Mortals were little more than cattle under the tyranny of the darkin, their supremacy apparent in the sorceries they had conceived—the arts of crafting flesh and transmuting blood, granting them mastery over life itself.

Believing himself above other mortal vassals, and therefore worthy of such power, Vladimir was the first of his kind permitted to study this terrifying magic. His devotion earned him a place of favor in his patron’s warhost, and the right to practice hemomancy and enforce the darkin’s will on lesser beings. Over time, the god-warrior watched with amusement as Vladimir came to govern his subjects with as little mercy as the darkin themselves.

The fall of these cruel tyrants is, likewise, the stuff of legend. An account of it, written in the dead High Shuriman language, is kept hidden within the Immortal Bastion. It speculates that Vladimir’s master was not imprisoned like so many of his kin, but instead died at the hands of his own warhost. The few surviving mortals fled, taking what knowledge they had of blood magic with them.

Unknown to all but Vladimir himself, it was he who struck the killing blow. Scarred, blinded, driven mad by the radiance of a darkin’s undoing, he absorbed enough power to renew flesh that was never meant to last beyond a mortal lifespan.

And he has done this countless times since, through rituals too vile to speak of.

At the height of Mordekaiser’s dark reign, it was said that a mythic and bloodthirsty fiend haunted the coastal cliffs of eastern Valoran, demanding young lives and savage worship from the local tribes. Few were welcome in his lair, until the day a pale sorceress approached this barbarian god with an offer. The two feasted together as equals, weaving magic so dark that the wine at their table soured, and the roses withered, vibrant red turning to black.

Thus began the pact between Vladimir and LeBlanc, rife with disputes, and games of politics and war. Over the centuries, others joined them—powerful nobles, exalted masters of magic, and beings darker still. This cabal grew into the hidden power that would guide the throne of Noxus for more than a thousand years, orchestrating many of the empire’s most ambitious campaigns.

Uniquely among the leaders of the Black Rose, Vladimir has rarely limited himself to scheming from the shadows. In the past, he deigned to join the Noxian noble courts during the most interesting of times, only to fade into seclusion decades later, his extreme age—and the atrocities his sorcery could wreak—a well-kept secret. Even so, under Vladimir’s tutelage, the art of hemomancy has found a place in the military of Noxus, and among scions of the old aristocracy. Among these diverse practitioners is the Crimson Circle, a youthful cult dedicated as much to Vladimir’s personality as to blood magic itself.

With the death of the previous Grand General and the rise of Jericho Swain, the political landscape of the empire changed dramatically, and Vladimir has been forced to rouse himself once more.

Wearing the guise of a benevolent socialite, he has returned to the public eye as a vocal opponent of the ruling Trifarix council… much to the concern of more cautious members of the Black Rose. Indeed, his reappearance may have come too soon, as time has not yet washed away all the stains of his previous lifetime, and it seems likely that Swain himself has begun to grasp Vladimir’s true nature.

As a new and darker conflict approaches Noxus, Vladimir drinks deeply from the renewed vitality of the empire, reminding himself of his past glories. To him, this life is a mere revelry, a masquerade spanning centuries, and the prologue to greatness—for though the darkin eventually fought amongst themselves and lost their immortal grip on the world, Vladimir knows he is strongest alone.

I watch the worm wriggling its way up from the sand.

Its fronded head sways this way and that as it tastes the air, sensing the ewer of water I keep by my bedside amid the pile of scrolls, bone styluses, and ink pots. The water is two days old, gritty with dust from a well that is dry more often than not—but the worm won’t care.

I admire its courage, emerging from its home beneath the sand before a creature hundreds, if not thousands, of times its size. It must surely know I could crush it beneath my sandaled foot, but it has no fear of me. A hair-fine tongue emerges as the worm eases itself through the hole in the threadbare rug covering the floor of my humble abode.

The rug was a last gift from my mother before I left Kenethet as an apprentice stonemason in the employ of Arch-Mason Nouria. Even as a young man, my skill with a chisel, rasp, and file was well known, and had earned me first place in the annual Feast of the Ascended, where I carved a likeness of Setaka.

It had also drawn the attention of the Arch-Mason, whose great carvings adorned the carved frontage of Magyett Sadja’s silk palace in Nashramae, and the Sun Temple of Bel’zhun. Some said she had even sculpted the likenesses of great men and women across the ocean in a city where the streets were paved in gold and great machines of magic did the work of ten strong men. I do not know if I truly believe these latter tales, for Nouria never speaks of any work she has done beyond the sands of Shurima.

I remember the moment she lifted my statue vividly, though it is close to twenty years ago now...

“How did you choose the look of the queen of the god-warriors?” she asked, her voice not yet worn thin by the years and her lungs not yet ravaged by the dust of her great work. “No true likenesses have ever been found of Setaka.”

I had been prepared for that question and replied with my carefully rehearsed answer.

“I dreamed of her,” I said, with the earnestness of youth. “I dreamed I saw her lead the Last Charge, and she turned to me just before I awoke, her head haloed by the setting sun.”

“A fine answer, young man,” she said, “but I happen to recognize this face. If I’m not mistaken, this is a sand-maiden working in the employ of Benida-Marah.”

I blushed, caught in my lie.

But Arch-Mason Nouria only laughed and said, “Don’t be abashed, boy. You’re not the first artist to use their lover as a model.”

She turned my sculpture this way and that, running her fingertips over the stone and nodding, judging my work and, apparently, finding it worthy.

“How would you like to be my apprentice?” she asked.

I left Kenethet the next day, following the Arch-Mason across the northern reaches of the Sai Kahleek, to Xolan.

To where the faceless god awaited.

I pour a small amount of water onto the ground near the worm before strapping my tool belt around my waist. It hangs loose over my hips, and I fear I may need to use my awl to punch another hole in the leather. Our food is not plentiful, and if the trade caravans do not pass our way, we sometimes go weeks with our meager supplies strictly rationed.

I leave the worm wriggling happily in his little pool, pleased to have been able to help him survive. Every living thing deserves its chance to exist. I am reminded of the mendicant preacher who passed through our town last year, and told me that even the smallest creatures are part of the Great Weaver’s plan.

I wonder what became of her, for she seemed in a great hurry.

Putting her and the worm from my mind, I head outside, feeling the heat of the day even though the sun is still to fully rise. The sky is a velvety blue, a few stars still glittering in pleasing patterns above.

A gust of cold air disturbs the stone dust that swoops in playful spirals along the street. The wind carries the smell of something foul, like spoiled meat or rancid milk, and I wonder if some wild animal is lying dead somewhere nearby.

The ground hereabouts is rocky and mostly inhospitable, but there are signs it was once abundantly fertile and used to raise crops and graze animals. The Shuriman desert is far from the lifeless wasteland many outsiders believe it to be; it has a vibrant ecosystem of flora and fauna, some dangerous, some entirely harmless. Thankfully, we are untroubled by dangerous predators or bandits in Xolan, in part thanks to our remoteness, but also because the elder stonemasons tell us Xolaani herself watches over us, protecting us so that we might restore her to glory.

Work starts early, and scores of yawning masons are already making their way to the great cliff to carry out their assigned tasks. We share morning greetings before scattering to our assigned duties around or upon the great statue.

And though I have seen it every day for the last two decades, it still has the power to take my breath away.

The rock rises vertically in a solid escarpment, a towering wall of ochre stone, layered in wind-worn knife-like outcroppings. Some of those we have cut from the cliff to create our canvas, others we have left as great windbreaks to better preserve our work.

And what work it is! The statue of Ascended Xolaani is, quite literally, a towering achievement.

Around three hundred yards from her carven feet to her shorn neck, the statue carved into the cliff had been all but worn away by centuries of neglect when I first laid eyes upon it. A passing traveler might even have missed it, were their eyes fixed too warily on the horizon.

The wind softened the detail of the sculpted robes wrapped around her legs, and a long-ago rockfall smashed portions of the kaftan billowing around her outflung arms like wings.

But most grievously of all, some ancient wound slashed clean through her carven stone face, leaving no hint as to the god-warrior’s true likeness. This legend from Shurima’s past has remained faceless for uncounted centuries, but we—the stonemasons of Xolan—are poised to finally restore her to glory once more.

If only we could agree on her true face.

“Water and shade to you, Arch-Mason,” I say, climbing onto the lift platform at the base of the cliff.

“Water and shade to you, Mennas,” Arch-Mason Nouria replies, without looking up. “You’re late.”

She says this to me every morning now, a habit she has fallen into lately, though I have never given her a reason to accuse me of tardiness.

“I was slaking the thirst of a worm,” I say.

“A worm?”

“Yes, it comes by every morning, looking for water.”

“And you give it some?”

“I do.”

She shakes her head, but I can see the idea of me keeping a worm as a pet amuses her.

I crane my neck, looking up the length of the statue. This close to the cliff, it is impossible to make out the details, but as we rise we will be able to see the stonework.

A network of scaffolding clings to the face of the cliff like the web of a spider, the wood brought at great expense from the jungles of the east, and the greener lands south of the mountains. Tempered ironwood beams and steps hammered into the rock allow masons to climb to where they need to work. A series of pulleys and ropes serve as an elevator to reach the highest portions of the statue.

It is there that Arch-Mason Nouria and I will be working today.

“Ready?” she asks.

“I am.”

I untie the loops of ropes securing the lift mechanism, and allow the counterweight rope to pull free of its moorings on the lift platform. The whole contraption judders, and I count the knots as we ascend, each one marking a twelve-foot interval.

I sit at the edge of the platform, relishing the increasing sense of height as we rise.

The town of Xolan is not large, a collection of perhaps two hundred souls clustered around a murky lake and patches of greenery that provide a little shade and some fruit from time to time. To live so far from the cities is hard, but what we do here is more important than any human comforts we might miss. Our dwellings are all finely made, as you would expect from a community of stonemasons, each uniquely crafted by the artisans within and reflective of their character and style. My own house is humble, its understated aesthetic reminiscent of my mother’s home in Kenethet.

A work-yard lies at the sunward edge of our town, filled with rock cut from the cliff, fallen boulders, and larger pieces of new, decorative stonework that have yet to be lifted into place.

Were we all to vanish tomorrow, its many statues, carvings, and master-worked blocks would stand as a testament to our life’s work.

A wide channel cuts through the heart of our town, running from the rubble-choked base of the cliff in a zig-zagging manner before disappearing beneath the sands of the Sai Kahleek. Shards of stone and sand fill its length, but I have seen pictures that show this channel was once awash with running water.

If the stories of the Hawk Emperor restoring the ancient city of Shurima to life are true, then little of his liquid bounty has come our way. But when we have restored the faceless god, the channel will once again flow with healing waters, and we will be lauded for our part in the land’s restoration.

“Tell me of Xolaani,” says Nouria, her eyes somewhere far away.

I have been waiting for this, and turn to smile at her.

This is another habit she has fallen into—having me recite the history of the god-warrior as we ascend. I do not mind indulging her, for it is good to remember why we do this, why we have all devoted our lives to restoring the face of the Ascended, even if much of what we know is fragmentary.

“Xolaani was said to be the daughter of a healer,” I begin, closing my eyes and tilting my head to the east, “a child born under the Aspect of the Protector at an auspicious passage of the sun. She lived in a time of great change for Shurima, when the war against the vile thaumaturges had just begun, and the armies of the emperor had suffered a great defeat before the walls of Icathia.

“Great was the suffering, and Xolaani worked tirelessly to save as many lives as she could, speaking out against the folly of emperors that still drove the tribes of the sun to make war with one another.”

Nouria nods, her eyes drifting over the horizon, as if seeing something I can not.

Is it my imagination, or do I detect a milkiness to the once sapphire-blue of her eyes...?

Sensing my scrutiny, she turns away. “Go on.”

“It is said that she saved hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives, but mourned that they were saved only to be sent back into the fighting. Some say she even spoke out against the emperor, calling him a warmonger and a despot.”

“Your tone tells me you find that unlikely,” says Nouria.

“If she spoke out against the emperor, why would he later agree to her being gifted with Ascension?”

“It was not the emperor who decreed who would rise to meet the sun, but the priests who read the augurs and charted the course of the future in the beams of its golden light. Rare would it be for any emperor to defy the will of the sun.”

“But not unheard of?”

She coughs, her lungs still weak from the fever that struck her last winter.

“No, not unheard of,” she says finally. “All too easy for one to manipulate the other. But keep going. Tell me what became of Xolaani when Shurima fell. Tell me about the conflict that followed.”

I’ve never needed to tell this part of the story. We always reach our destination before the details of Xolaani’s history grow more obscure. But now, with us bound for the missing face of the god-warrior, I have no choice but to continue.

The Arch-Mason catches my hesitation. “You have studied this, yes?”

“I have,” I assure her, “but many of our scrolls are incomplete, or wilfully opaque, filled with stories that are clearly exaggerated, or possibly entirely fabricated.”

“Tell me anyway.”

I nod and try to piece what fragments I have been able to gather into a coherent narrative, but I already know I will disappoint her.

“It is said there was a war. That without the Hawk Emperor, Azir, to guide them, a great conflict erupted between the Ascended Host—one the scrolls say almost tore the world apart.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I do not know,” I say, honestly. “History is full of conflicts that speak of world-ending threats, and while I am sure they would have been terrible to live through, the idea of them all being so cataclysmic feels... unlikely.”

“You may be right, but the long passage of the years has a tendency to dim the fires of such wars in the memory. What part did Xolaani play in this conflict?”

“Nothing certain,” I reply. “I have found little mention of her taking part in the wars between the god-warriors and those who would become known and feared as Darkin. There are veiled references to a being known as Ta’anari begging her to intervene and save the lives of the fallen. In some tellings she refuses, but others say she chose to bestow her healing gifts on those she deemed worthy, that she knew the innermost secrets of blood so deeply she could even return the dead to life. A final tale speaks of how she angered the most vicious of the Darkin, who struck her a fateful blow that laid her low for many centuries.”

Nouria knows much more of Xolaani than I, but likes to hear me tell the stories, as though being reminded helps carve them deeper into her memory.

In truth, I wonder if her mind has reached the point where these retellings are new to her each day... if she has begun the slow descent into her dotage.

I am spared further questions when the lift arrives at our destination.

Locking the ropes in place and hauling the restraining bar into position, we carefully step out onto the rocky ledge that runs around the colossal shoulders of the faceless god-warrior.

When the work is finally complete, the ledge will be hacked away and smoothed off, but for now it serves as our vantage point. I look down, unfazed by the dizzying drop.

I imagine what Xolan would look like were the waters to flow again.

A faded illustration in one of the elder stonemasons’ books shows water tumbling from the top of the cliff and falling in graceful arcs to either side of the great statue. In that picture, the small lake at the heart of our community is wide and full, its waters a wondrous shade of cerulean blue that narrows until it becomes a river flowing out into Shurima.

It is my hope that if we can divine the true face of Xolaani, that river will live again.

I hope to see the water soon.

Whatever fears I might harbor regarding Arch-Mason Nouria’s mind, she has lost none of her skill with the tools of her trade. Her hands may be tanned and leather-tough from years of practicing her craft, but they are graceful like no others when it comes to working the stone.

We are applying the last touches to the collar, layering in deeper folds that will cast a shadow that can be seen from the ground. It is an illusion, an old stonemason’s trick she taught me the first day I worked the rock of the cliff.

Today’s labors are more suited to that of a journeyman than a skilled mason like Nouria—but I sense that she needs to be working with her hands today, to be close to the stone.

All that remains to be carved is the statue’s face, but what features she should possess is a question upon which none of the stonemasons of Xolan can agree. The illustration depicting the waterfall is the only guide we have, and the face behind it is indistinct, hidden by the spray of water. Every mason within the village has sought to bring forth the truth of her visage in dreams, in drink, in prayer, but no consensus has yet been reached.

By mid-afternoon, there is little left for us to do, so we sit on the lip of the ledge, looking out over the undulant horizon. The sky is now a lush azure, the sun a copper disc descending in the west. The dunes ripple in the heat, as if disturbed from below.

In the deepest desert, sandswimmers leave hissing grooves in their wake—but here the bedrock is too close to the surface for them, so we rarely see the sand spouts that mark their passing.

“How do you think the meeting will go tonight?” asks the Arch-Mason, breaking my train of thought.

“Much like the others, I suspect.”

“I hear that Elder Bourai believes he is close to a likeness we may all agree upon.”

“You said that about Mason Ulantor’s proposal last month.”

“I did?”

“Yes, and Master Regouma’s the time before that.”

“Ah, yes, I did, didn’t I?” she says sadly. “All the more reason for this night’s meeting to be different.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will present this to the elders tonight,” says Nouria, pulling a folded scroll from her robes and holding it out to me.

“What is that?” I ask, almost reluctant to take it.

“Look,” she urges. “Then you’ll see.”

Taking the scroll, I hesitantly unfold it. My eyes widen as I see the charcoal sketch she has drawn. Had she not been called to the stone, Nouria could almost certainly have become one of Shurima’s greatest artists.

She has drawn a face, one that is beyond compare, a chimeric blend of the inhuman and the sublime. There is deep wisdom in the dark pools of its hooded eyes, infinite compassion, but also the capacity for lethal violence inherent in each of the god-warriors.

“It’s... incredible. How did you do this?”

“It came to me in a dream,” she says, with an impish grin that takes decades from her wind-worn face. “Just as you did with your sculpture of Setaka, remember?”

“But I was lying. Is this really the Ascended Xolaani?”

Nouria shrugs. “It might as well be.”

“What does that mean?”

She sighs, and I see the toll the years have taken on this brilliant woman. The stiffness in her fingers, the weariness deep in her bones, and—yes, now that I look harder—the growing mist in her eyes. She twists her head to look up at the scarred rock where the face of the Ascended should be.

“This will be my last sculpture,” says Nouria. “There is a sickness in my heart. My mother had it, as did hers before her. I am older now than when they died, so I will count myself fortunate if I live to see the year’s end. I do not wish to pass before seeing my greatest work completed.”

“But is it real?” I ask. “If the elders accept this and we carve it, will it be real?”

She takes back the picture, her face betraying her disappointment in me, and looks down at the gray-brown lake.

“I just want to see the blue waters flow,” she says. “One last time.”

I lay on my bed, but sleep eludes me. I watch the moonlight move across my mother’s rug as the lonely hours of the night pass without the elders coming to a decision. The voices echoing from the Mason’s Hall are as strident as when they first began, but I suspect I already know what the outcome will be.

Respect for Arch-Mason Nouria holds powerful sway in our community, and her drawing is more magnificent than any yet presented to the elders.

I believe they will accept it as a true likeness, because it is miraculous.

They will accept it because they are tired of not knowing.

We all want the work to be completed in our lifetimes, to know that the face of the god who has watched over us for all these years will finally be finished.

We all want to see the waters flow once more.

For decades, we have bickered and debated, but every interpretation we have attempted to place upon Xolaani is hamstrung by our so-very-mortal sensibilities.

How can we, beings so far removed from the time of the Ascended, ever hope to know them, or imagine their likenesses? They are beings wrought by the power of the sun, raised up to godhood by powers both ancient and divine.

To imagine that any of us could set down their form is arrogant beyond words, and I feel a simmering resentment knot my gut at Nouria’s presumption. I am gripping the edge of my bed, a turbulent storm of emotions churning in my gut.

My mouth is dry with fear and unease.

For a moment, I dearly want the Arch-Mason’s drawing to be real, but how can I be sure?

I scoop up a handful of water from the ewer and splash it over my face. It tastes old and the flecks of stone dust wear at my teeth. I run my tongue over my gums and spit a gritty mouthful back onto the dusty floor.

To have spent so long working the stone only to falter at the last for the sake of convenience seems inherently wrong to me. I understand Nouria’s desire to see the work completed before she dies, but to present her vision as truth...?

What if we finish the great work on a lie? I do not like where this thought will lead, and so I stand, pulling on a woolen cloak to keep the night’s chill at bay.

Something crunches beneath my foot.

The frond-mouthed sandworm is dead beneath my sandal.

Its flattened, segmented body is faintly luminous in the moonlight, and my eyes fill with tears. It is only a tiny worm, but I feel an aching sadness at its needless death.

I chide myself for mourning the passing of a worm, when a whisper of warm breath sighs through my window, bearing a sound I have not heard since leaving Kenethet.

I cannot be certain, but it sounds like the pygmy owls that used to nest in the night-woods at the edge of the Sai Kahleek, luring insects with their clicking chirps. I climb the ladder to the roof of my home and open the bolted shutter, feeling the cool night air chill my skin, even through my cloak.

Standing on the flat roof, knowing I will surely not see a pygmy owl, I search the night sky all the same.

There is no owl of course, but lowering my gaze, I see something far stranger.

The lake at the center of our community is gone.

Its levels rise and fall with the seasons, yes, but there is always water.

Now it is gone, simply an empty, rocky basin, its exposed banks and lakebed patterned with a curious spiral, as though the water had carved the mud before vanishing.

The warm wind emanates from where the lake once lay, and I look up at the faceless god carved in the cliff.

“Xolaani, show me the way,” I whisper as I drop from the roof to the sand and make my way toward the vanished lake.

It chills me to see the lakebed emptied, not because we relied upon it for our water, but because to see it vanished on the very night we may finally know the face of Xolaani feels portentous.

Kneeling at the edge, I run my fingers over the mud on its sloping banks. I expect it to be moist and pliant, but it is hard and glassy—like glazed clay after being fired in a kiln.

“What could have done this?” I whisper. The entirety of the lakebed has been vitrified to the same enameled consistency.

Once again, I hear the strange sound that drew me from my house, like chattering birds in the high branches of palm trees. It seems to be coming from the center of the lakebed, and I carefully make my way down the ridged slopes.

The bottom is flat, filled with broken shards of stone, fragments carelessly discarded by the craftsmen above. I see a stone-cut hand with two of its fingers missing, a foot with the heel broken off.

I see faces too. Some are half-sunk into the strangeness of the glassy lakebed, some split open down their length, others looking like they are pressing up from beneath the surface. Their faces are grotesque horrors, their mouths stretched in contorted grimaces. I cannot imagine any of the stonemasons of Xolan having carved such monstrous things, but understand why they would wish to be rid of them.

I give these ghastly things a wide berth.

Moonlight skitters over the rippled glass beneath my feet, sending fractured reflections all around me. Is it my imagination, or is the surface of the lakebed glowing with a soft, inner radiance? The full moon makes it hard to be sure, but then a cloud passes over its face and I am suddenly certain; there is a faint light pulsing from the ground.

It takes a moment for me to realize it is precisely in sync with the beating of my heart.

My steps carry me towards the center of the lakebed, which I now see is the source of the light and the whispering, chattering birds. The ground at the center of the spiral is cracked, split open, and ever so slightly sunken. Hairline cracks radiate outward, and when the wind changes, my stomach heaves as I catch the same rancid smell from earlier this morning.

It is the stench of an opened grave, of meat and fruit left to rot in the sun.

I take a single step back, then another.

Before I can take a third, my eyes narrow as I see a long flat shard of stone, like a mask made for a giant.

The moon emerges from behind the clouds, and the exposed stone’s surface shines like polished porcelain. The beauty of the face carved into the stone takes my breath away, blended as it is with an inhuman, but alluringly wise mien of something atavistic.

Its eyes seem to glimmer with a wisdom far beyond anything I could conceive, and I try to memorize its every contour, knowing that Xolaani herself has guided me to this revelation. I neither know nor care how this thing came to be submerged beneath our lake, that it is here and has been revealed to me on this singular night is enough for me.

I kneel beside the softly glowing stone, reaching to touch it with trembling fingertips.

Faith brought me to Xolan all those years ago, and now my faith has been rewarded.

I must bring the elders to see this miracle...

No sooner has the thought formed in my mind than the ground at the center of the lake breaks apart with a splintering crack like the clean hammer-cut of a block. Portions of the lakebed fall inwards, drawn down into the growing sinkhole.

I scramble backward as the cracks spread wider and wider.

The charnel stench billows up from below, and I feel the night grow still, the wind dropping away and the stars holding their breath.

Something emerges from the hole at the center of the lakebed, a pale, spindle-thin appendage that reminds me of the frond-mouthed worm in my home. It is swiftly followed by another and, together, they haul the pulsating, segmented body of a... a thing from below.

It is the size of a hound, its soft grub-like body tapered, wet, and glistening.

Just looking at it leaves a bilious taste in my mouth.

A multitude of black orbs ripple into existence on the surface of its head, and its skin splits apart as a circular, fang-rimmed mouth rips open. Black ichor drips from the toothed orifice. As it turns its misshapen head towards me, terror fills my veins with ice.

Another creature hauls its insect-like bulk to the surface, its form just as horrible as the first, an unnatural assembly of bladed limbs, dripping teeth, and chitinous armor. More are following, and my mind screams in terror.

But the sound they make is enough to melt the ice in my veins.

Pushing myself upright, I turn and run, no thought but escape burning in my mind. I hear them behind me, a skittering cacophony of sharp claws on the glassy lakebed. Their hissing, rasping cries echo strangely from the rock.

It is a sound not of this world.

Breathless with terror, I climb the slopes of the empty lake, scrabbling for purchase and finding none. The ground is glass, not mud, and my fingers are slick with fear-sweat. I kick off my sandals, and the bare skin of my feet gives enough grip to haul myself over the lip of the banks.

I scramble onto my knees, risking a swift glance over my shoulder.

The lakebed is filled with the hideous, chittering beasts, hundreds of them now. They swarm together—blind, idiot things, hooting and braying, hissing and spitting as they boil up from the ground. Dozens more emerge from the widening sinkhole with every passing second.

I weep as I see the porcelain face obscured by their monstrous forms, the stone flowing like wax, as though their very presence is anathema to its beauty.

With tears in my eyes and sobs wracking my chest, I turn and run for the Mason’s Hall, screaming a warning at the top of my lungs.

“Monsters! Flee!”

I cannot tell if I have been heard, but my foolish urge to look back has cost me dear.

Something sharp and hooked slashes over the back of my thigh, and I fall, going down in a graceless tangle of limbs. I roll, feeling a terrible burning heat spread from the wound as blood pours down my leg. I try to stand, but the leg is useless beneath me.

I hear voices—panicked, terrified cries as the stonemasons of Xolan see the hundreds of terrible things swarming toward them.

Someone rings a warning bell, but it will do no good.

I roll onto my back as one of the creatures rears over me. Its chest splits open down its length, revealing a fleshy red cavity of toothed tentacles and barbed fangs. It falls on me, the gaping maw of its body fastening on my stomach and devouring me in a frenzy of ripping teeth.

It is agony beyond imagining as the thing eats me alive.

But I cannot die looking at this nightmarish creature, and so with the last of my strength, I turn my head to look up at Ascended Xolaani.

“They said you watched over us...”

I almost expect her to reply, but she has no face and so she says nothing.