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POV - Azra'il
They departed before dawn.
Morgana and Kayle flew at the column's head, close enough to the army below to lead, yet high enough that the sight of those paired wings, white and black, gold and purple, was the first thing any foe would behold upon glancing their way. The message was clear without need of words: we are coming.
Below, the judicators marched. Hundreds of them, armour polished, formation rigid, the rhythmic thud of their footsteps echoing across the road like the beat of a gargantuan drum. And at the front of the ground column, mounted upon a white stallion that appeared to have been chosen more for aesthetic flair than functionality: Ronas.
He did not march in silence. Of course he didn't. Men like Ronas know nought of silence; to them, silence is wasted time that could be filled with their own voice.
"The Winged Protector guides us!" his voice projected over the ranks with the practiced clarity of one who knows volume is a form of authority. "We take justice beyond the walls! Where darkness treads, we shall scorch the earth so that nothing foul may take root again!"
The judicators drank in every word. Some struck their swords against shields in a rhythmic response. Others repeated his phrases, echoes of echoes, each repetition solidifying the rhetoric until it bore the weight of truth through sheer insistence.
"The enemies of light deserve no clemency! Clemency is for those who kneel! For those who bow! For those who recognise Justice as Mistress! Those who oppose us are weeds that the Protector shall pluck out by the root!"
[Yes.]
[No. It is a congregation marching to prove their faith.]
In the air, the sisters flew side-by-side. The wind between them carried that specific tension measured in things left unsaid. Morgana stared ahead. Kayle stared ahead. Neither looked at the other.
Until Morgana broke the stiff atmosphere.
"It has been an age since we last flew together," she said. Her voice was far too casual to be genuine. "And the few times we do, it is always to resolve some crisis."
Kayle did not reply immediately. But I saw the corner of her mouth twitch. Almost. Almost a smile. Almost a "true enough."
"It would be pleasant..." Morgana continued, "...one day, to fly simply for the sake of flight. Without destination. Without war. Without—"
"It would." Kayle cut her off. But she didn't do it with coldness. She did it with agreement. The words came swiftly, as though Kayle had let them slip before the 'Protector' filter could censor her.
For half a second, the air between them grew lighter. I nearly believed it would last.
Then Kayle looked down. At the ranks of white tunics. At the swords striking shields. At Ronas, whose white horse shone under the sunrise like a clarion of holy war.
And her face closed. The agreement vanished. The Protector returned. Like a curtain falling in the middle of a play.
[And an audience is the most efficient cage there is.]
Zephyra appeared on the horizon like an open wound.
A large city. High stone walls that had weathered decades. Watchtowers at the corners. The sort of city built to endure, and which was now testing that promise with the grace of one discovering that the manufacturer's guarantee does not cover acts of war.
Smoke rose from several points outside the walls. The enemy army was camped in an arc around the northern face, a mass of dark tents, crimson banners, and siege engines in various stages of assembly. The scale was visible from the air: thousands of soldiers. Not a skirmish. An invasion planned with the kind of logistics requiring months and an ego the size of a continent.
But it wasn't the army that made me squint.
[Magic. Heavy. The signature is unlike anything I have catalogued in these memories. Older. Denser.]
[Considerably.]
[We are not stuffed. The sisters are. We are bodiess observers. The worst that can happen to us is watching.]
Morgana landed upon Zephyra's ramparts alongside Kayle. City soldiers came running, faces of men who hadn't slept in days, deep bags under their eyes, armour that had seen more use in a week than in a decade. I've seen that face before. In every city, in every life. The face of someone who knows the cavalry has arrived and is trying to decide whether to feel relief or shame for needing it.
"Protectors! Heavens be praised—"
And it was there, whilst the soldiers explained the situation and Kayle was already assessing the battlefield outside, that Morgana looked down. To the external base of the wall. To the outside, where the soldiers weren't looking because they were too busy staring at the army on the horizon.
A man lay slumped against the stone. Outside. He wasn't a soldier. Workman's clothes, torn, drenched in sweat and blood, a deep gash on his arm and a burn on his shoulder bearing the unmistakable signature of magic.
Morgana descended from the wall and went to him. The man lifted his eyes upon seeing the black wings; instead of fear, what appeared on his face was relief so desperate it looked like pain.
"I thought I should die here," he said, his voice raw. "Tried to get back to warn them... the gates had already closed. No one heard me shouting."
"I am listening now." Magic already flowed in Morgana's hands, purple, subtle, knitting the gash on his arm, soothing the shoulder burn as she spoke. "What happened?"
"I tried to flee. Before the siege closed in." He swallowed hard. "I was running along the edge of the wall, on the outside, seeking a path south. And I saw them." His good hand pointed tremblingly downwards, to the base of the wall where the stone met the earth. Sewer pipes. Dark openings at the base, wide enough for a person to pass through crouched, partially covered by iron bars that had been ripped away or melted. "There. Through the sewers. Mages. Dozens of them. Dark robes, faces covered. Entering the base of the wall one after the other, like ants." His voice shook. "One of them spotted me. Cast a spell at me before I could run. I fell into a ravine. I crawled back here thinking I'd bleed out without anyone knowing what I saw."
Morgana looked at the sewer pipes. The melted grates. The darkness within, not abandonment, but a passage. Several mages had infiltrated the city.
Morgana took this to Kayle.
"Kay. There are mages infiltrated within the city. Dozens. They entered through the sewers at the base of the wall before the siege closed." She pointed to the pipes with the melted grates. "There's a man out here who nearly died trying to get back to warn everyone. They attacked him so he wouldn't tell a soul."
Kayle looked at the pipes. Looked at the direction where the man lay. Then she looked ahead, where the army was readying and that dense energy pulsed like a second heart in the centre of the camp.
"The priority is the army in front, Morgana. There is a mage there who is making the earth tremble. You felt the energy. If we don't take off the head, the body won't stop. The civilians are protected by the walls for now; I will not let this army pass."
"And if the infiltrators open the gates from within? Or attack the civilians?"
"Then we must be swift." Kayle turned forward. "Stay at my side. Together, we strike down the lead Mage, and then we shall hunt down the rats that remain."
Together. At my side. The same old words. The same promise embedded in tactics. And I saw, by the way Morgana set her jaw, that she already knew this promise was about to be tested in a way neither of them wanted.
[Kayle is not wrong regarding the priority.]
The battle began with the sound battles always start with: screams, metal, and the sudden, visceral certainty that no one there will leave exactly as they entered. I've heard that sound in enough lives to identify it with my eyes closed, and it never improved. It never became easier. It never ceased to mean that someone alive in the morning will not be there by nightfall.
Kayle advanced with the judicators through the main front. Ronas led the right flank, mounted on his white horse which now looked less aesthetic and more functional, sword in hand, his voice barking orders that were half-tactical, half-sermon.
"For the Protector! Not one step back! Justice does not retreat!"
The judicators surged forward with the fervour of those fighting for something beyond survival. Every strike delivered with the certainty of one believing they are doing holy work. I've seen soldiers like that. The most dangerous aren't the skilled ones; they're the ones with conviction. Because the convinced do not hesitate. And those who don't hesitate do not calculate. And those who don't calculate cause the sort of damage you can't fix with apologies afterwards.
I watched from above, through the eyes of Morgana, who hadn't yet descended. Observing. Divided. Her hand on her sword hilt tightened and released, tightened and released, the nervous twitch of one making a decision without realising they've already made it.
Then, the mage carrying that dense energy revealed himself.
He rose. Not with wings, but with pure power. The air around him distorted like heat over embers, gravity bending around a body that shouldn't have been floating, but which reality seemed to have stopped questioning. In his right hand, a staff of black metal, long, worked with runes that glowed a dull red. And at the peak, slotted like a gem in an iron crown: something that pulsed with a wrong intensity.
It wasn't light. It wasn't common magic. It was something older than both.
[If you are thinking of a World Rune... nearly. It is but a fragment. Not a whole rune. But the energy signature is consistent with the texts we've read and what Morgana described whilst teaching magic. Power capable of reshaping reality. This is a shard. And it is already making the air vibrate hundreds of yards away.]
[A whole rune caused the Rune Wars. Civilisations erased. Continents reshaped. It is why these people fled here.]
The mage announced himself. Because of course he did. Villains with power of this calibre always announce themselves. In hundreds of lives, I've never seen someone with cosmic power use it discreetly. It's a universal law: the greater the power, the bigger the ego, and the longer the introductory speech.
"I AM VALDRIC!" his voice was projected by magic, amplified until every syllable hit the walls like a shockwave. "HERALD OF THE NEW ERA! MAGES RULED THIS WORLD ONCE, AND THEY SHALL RULE AGAIN! EVERY CITY HIDING MAGI BEHIND PETRICITE WALLS SHALL LEARN THAT WALLS CANNOT HOLD THE INEVITABLE!"
The staff spun in his hand. The runic fragment pulsed.
The first spell struck the battlefield and the earth split. Not just cracked, split. Fissures raced in straight lines like open veins in the soil, swallowing soldiers in the wrong path; the ground rising in tectonic plates that should not have moved, yet moved nonetheless. Where the staff's beam touched, matter obeyed: armour melted like wax, shields disintegrated into dust, and soldiers not killed by the impact were tossed like leaves in a gale.
[Beyond anything we have faced in Runeterra thus far. Below Aatrox in raw power, but the nature of runic energy is different; it isn't force, it is authority. The rune does not attack matter; it rewrites its rules. In a sense, it is more dangerous than a Darkin.]
[Likely both.]
Kayle engaged directly. Without hesitation. Without visible calculation. The Protector saw the threat and flew towards it like a comet that had found its purpose.
Celestial fire against runic energy, the impact of the two powers colliding created a shockwave that flattened the trees below in a radius of several yards. Kayle charged with Mihira's blade burning, each stroke through the air carrying divine flames that sliced Valdric's spells like scissors through silk. He blocked. He counter-attacked. The staff fired a pillar of runic energy which Kayle dodged by inches, the trail of destruction passing behind her and opening a trench several yards long in the soil.
It was spectacular. Destructive. Massive. The kind of combat that made the sky feel like its own battlefield; golden light and runic energy clashing in detonations that blinded anyone who looked directly.
Below, the judicators fought galvanised. Every explosion in the sky was confirmation that the Protector was there, that divine power was real, that faith was justified. I saw it in their faces, glancing up between strikes, seeking the golden shimmer, and I recognised the expression. It wasn't courage. It was fanaticism. And the two look very much alike until the moment they look nothing alike at all.
Morgana watched from the top of the ramparts. Her hand gripping the sword hilt. Her eyes alternating between the sky, where her sister fought, and the streets behind her, where the screaming was beginning.
[You are thinking what I am thinking.]
And then the screams within the city intensified.
Morgana descended from the walls.
What she found in the streets of Zephyra was not merely an infiltration. It was pure chaos.
The first square she saw was ablaze. Not the flames of an accidental fire, but spell-fire: concentrated, directed, launched at market stalls where civilians were hiding. Bodies on the ground. Women dragging children through narrow alleys to hide. An old man attempting to extinguish his own shop's fire with a bucket of water whilst the wall beside him melted under magic.
And the mages.
They were everywhere. Not just a handful; it seemed many more. Dark robes, faces covered, scattered throughout the city like a metastasised infection. They worked in groups of three or four, coordinated and methodical. One group would advance down a street, detonating façades with explosive spells, forcing the residents to flee towards another group waiting at the street's end. Cornered. A trap. The kind of tactic not invented on the battlefield, but planned at a desk with maps and coldness by people who know exactly what they are doing and do not care.
The civilians were running from one direct danger into another.
Morgana saw a group of mages kicking in a house door. An entire family, mother, father, three children, dragged into the street. The father tried to interpose himself. A spell hurled him against the wall with enough force to break things that should never break. The mother screamed. The children screamed.
The mages did not stop. They did not hesitate. They hadn't even the decency to look uncomfortable. They were efficient. Professional. The sort of folk I've met in more worlds than I'd like to count; people who switched off their empathy as easily as one switches off a lamp and carried on with the job.
Morgana waited no longer.
The chains flew. Purple, incandescent, lashing into the two nearest mages and yanking them off the ground like someone pulling weeds with a personal grudge. The third turned to her, and Mihira's blade was already descending. He blocked with a magical shield that cracked on impact and gave way an instant later. The blade sliced the robe and the arm beneath. He fell.
The family ran. The mother dragging the father. The children weeping.
Morgana did not stop to check if they were alright. She couldn't. For on the next street: more explosions. More screams. More dark robes advancing through a city that lacked sufficient soldiers within to defend it, the majority having been sent to the front line.
[Based on movement patterns and the magical signatures I can detect, between fifty and sixty infiltrators distributed across at least six different points in the city. Multiple objectives: sow panic, eliminate civilians, and based on the trajectory of two groups heading for the east gate—]
[Yes, to open the wall from within.]
If they managed to open the gate, Valdric's army would enter from the rear whilst Kayle and the judicators were fighting at the front. The city would fall in minutes. The women, children, and elderly. All the families. Everything.
Morgana looked to the sky. High above, golden and crimson explosions tore through the clouds, Kayle and Valdric, two powers colliding on a scale that made the ground tremble even here. Her sister was fighting. She needed her up there.
She looked to the streets of Zephyra. A woman ran carrying a babe whilst two mages chased her through an alley. In the next square, a group of elderly folk were cornered against a fountain whilst three dark robes approached with spells readied. Towards the east gate, more mages moving, organised, with purpose.
If Morgana went to the sky to help Kayle, dozens of families would die. The mages would destroy more of the city. They would reach the gate. They would open the walls. And everything Kayle was fighting to protect at the front would be lost from behind.
If she stayed here, her sister would fight alone against a mage with a World Rune fragment. Alone.
The promise echoed: 'I shall always be by your side.' Her own voice, spoken with
the conviction of one who believes what they say and intends to keep it.
In the street behind her, a child screamed.
Morgana closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was already moving. To the streets. To the people. Away from her sister.
[Because she cannot hear innocent folk screaming and turn her back.]
What followed were the two longest hours of Morgana's life.
She surged through the city like a contained force of nature. Where the infiltrated mages used mass destruction, spells detonating entire squares, blowing up façades, turning streets into furnaces, she used surgical precision. Where they brought down entire houses with explosive spells, she raised her shield, the purple dome, visible, shimmering against the dust and flames, over cornered groups of civilians, absorbing impacts that would have killed dozens.
I have seen many people fight. I've seen those who fight for rage, for duty, for fun, for boredom. It's never quite the same thing.
Morgana fought like someone performing surgery. Each blow was a scalpel. Each chain was a suture. Each shield was anaesthesia. She wasn't combating mages; she was treating a sick city, and the invading mages were the virus.
In the central square, she found seven mages surrounding a group of nearly a hundred civilians cornered against the council building. Civilians who had nowhere to run because every exit was blocked by magical fire. The mages were taking turns hurlings spells at the group, not to kill all at once, but to terrorise. To make them scream. The sound of panicking civilians was the music they wanted to be heard at the front line.
Morgana landed between the mages and the civilians.
The shield rose, a translucent purple wall covering the entire group. The spells hit the surface and exploded in sparks that dissipated into the air. The civilians behind felt the impact as a dull vibration, nothing more. And I saw, in their faces, in the wide eyes, in hands clutching children, the moment they realised someone had come. That between them and death, a woman with black wings and divine powers had appeared, one who didn't know them, would never know their names, and was there nonetheless.
Then Morgana advanced.
The chains erupted from her back, four at a time, each with an address. Two mages were snatched off the ground and hurled against the walls with the delicacy of someone tossing rubbish into a bin. A third tried to shield himself behind a woman he was dragging by the arm, the kind of cowardice that makes me wish for a body simply so I could punch someone, and Morgana adjusted the chain, circumvented the hostage's body, and ensnared the mage by the neck. The fourth and fifth conjured shields. Mihira's blade cleaved them both in consecutive strikes with the efficiency of one who knows magical anatomy as well as human. The sixth ran. The chain caught him at the corner. The seventh surrendered.
Seven mages in less than a minute. Over a hundred civilians alive. No one applauded. No one shouted "glory to the Redeemer." They just ran. And that, somehow, was more honest than any adoration.
And in the next square, more screams.
In the market, three mages had trapped a group of traders inside a warehouse and set it alight. The strategy was to cause maximum horror and panic throughout the city with minimum effort. Morgana kicked in the side wall with a strike of her sword, raised her shield over civilians already inhaling smoke, and used her chains to incapacitate the mages whilst the building collapsed amidst the fire.
In a residential street, a mage had entered a house and was dragging a family out by force: the father unconscious on the floor, the mother fighting with bare fists, two small children screaming as they clung to her skirt. The oldest story in the world. The most repeated. The one I've seen in every life and which never, in any of them, ceased to make me feel the same thing. Morgana arrived through the window. The mage did not see her until the chains were already around his chest, tightening, yanking, pulling him away from the children with a force that brooked no negotiation.
Every confrontation was a puzzle. Because the mages used civilians as shields. Because indiscriminate explosions brought down more houses. Because every blow Morgana struck had to be calculated so as not to destroy what she was attempting to save. Where Kayle could simply explode, because when you fight in the sky, the collateral damage is merely a cloud, Morgana fought in three-yard-wide alleys where every wall was someone's home, every bit of rubble was a family's roof, every misplaced spell was a child who doesn't come back.
Outside, the sky tore with explosions of celestial light. In here, Morgana did the work no one was going to remember.
Towards the east gate, Morgana intercepted the group of mages trying to reach the opening mechanism. Eight of them, the most highly trained, advancing in formation. She faced them alone in the narrow corridor of the inner wall. Sword in one arm. Chains in the other. Her magical shield protecting three wounded soldiers who were in the way.
All eight mages fell. None reached the gate.
The wall held. The city held. Because Morgana held. And it was then, with sweat in her eyes and the blood of others on her armour and the exhaustion of hours of uninterrupted combat pulsing in every muscle, that the scream came.
She returned to the streets. More mages. More cornered civilians. More shields raised over families who did not know her name and never would. More chains wrenching dark-robed men away from unarmed folk. Her body was accumulating exhaustion and stress like one accumulates debt.
And it was then, with sweat in her eyes and others' blood on her armour and the weight of constant battle, that the scream came.
Kayle's voice cut through everything.
It cut through the din of battle. It cut through the stone walls. It cut the distance between the front line and the city's interior as if geography were irrelevant when one sister screams for the other.
It was not the Protector's voice. It was not the court's voice. It was the raw, torn voice of someone who was wounded, who needed aid, and who could not help but scream for the person who had always been at her side.
Morgana's name. Screamed in a way that I felt in my very bones.
I've heard many screams over the course of my lives. War cries. Death rattles. Screams of victory and defeat and everything in between. But the scream of someone calling the name of the person they love in the middle of a battle, that scream is different from all others. Because it does not ask for victory. It does not ask for vengeance. It asks for presence. It asks, "be here." And when the person called cannot be... that is the loneliest sound that exists.
Morgana froze.
Her entire body locked, her sword halting mid-stroke against a mage still standing, chains suspended, eyes widening towards the ramparts, towards the sky where the shimmer of the fight between Kayle and Valdric had become erratic, uneven. Kayle's power signature was oscillating.
She was about to move. I saw the impulse, the leg muscles contracting, the wings spreading, her body bracing to take flight towards her sister.
And then, in the alleyway behind her, the screams.
Children. Three, four, impossible to tell by the sound. And the deep voice of a mage incanting. And the sound of a woman pleading.
Kayle's scream in the air. The children's screams in the alley. Both at once. Both asking for the same thing: aid, please, someone, in opposite directions.
Morgana looked to the sky. To the wall. To the direction where her sister was. She looked to the alley. To the dark. To the direction where the children were.
Morgana went to the alley.
She found two mages with five hostages, a mother and four children, the smallest no older than three. One mage had his hand around the mother's neck and was incanting with the other. The second held two children by the arms whilst preparing a spell that glowed with the unequivocal intent to kill.
The chains snatched them away from the children before the spell could finish. The sword did the rest. Swiftly, precisely, and with a contained fury that told me every scream Morgana had heard within these walls was being repaid now, with interest.
The mother hugged her children. The children wept. And in the sky, Kayle's scream did not repeat.
Morgana stood still in the alley for three seconds. Staring upwards. At the sky that was quieter now, the explosions diminishing, the runic energy weakening. The battle at the front was ending.
But her sister's scream echoed, and it would echo for a long time, in Morgana's mind.
The battle ended as almost all battles end: not with a clean moment, but with the slow perception that the sounds are fading. The spells stopping. The screams turning into weeping. Armies becoming rubble and people trying to pick themselves up.
Morgana emerged from Zephyra through the main gate. Covered in dust and soot and the blood of enemy mages. She was exhausted, yet not severely wounded. The infiltrated mages were powerful, but none possessed a runic shard. None had the power to truly wound an actual Ascendant. But the stress was real, hours of constant combat wear down any body, even a semi-divine one, but her cuts were superficial. The cost had been of another kind. The kind that does not bleed on the outside.
Meanwhile, the battlefield at the front was pure devastation.
The earth was split into fissures extending in every direction like open veins. Craters marked where runic spells had struck the ground. Melted armour. Shattered siege engines. The remains of the enemy army, those who survived, fleeing in disarray over the horizon; leaderless, without formation, without purpose. The sort of stampede that happens when the lighthouse goes out and the boats realise they were following a madman.
And in the centre of it all, Kayle.
Standing. Even when the price of standing was visible in every inch of her frame: armour damaged in several places, cuts on her left arm and thigh where runic energy had managed to breach her celestial defence, dried golden blood in lines running down the metal. Her right wing trembled, overloaded. She looked like a war statue someone had used for target practice and which refused to fall through sheer structural stubbornness.
Around her, the judicators were collecting the wounded and dealing with prisoners. Ronas was among them: blood on his white tunic, a dirty sword, a gash on his face that would become a scar. He had fought. Truly fought. And that, as I have said, was what made him dangerous.
But Morgana's eyes were not on Ronas. They were on the ground. At the corpse.
What was left of Valdric was little more than a charred silhouette. Not merely defeated, incinerated. Celestial fire had consumed the body with a completeness that went beyond combat, beyond necessity, beyond any reasonable definition of proportional force. It was annihilation. It was a statement. His hands still gripped the remains of the staff, broken in half, the black metal twisted, the runes extinguished. At the spot where the World Rune fragment had been, there was only an empty, burned space.
Kayle held something in her right hand. Small. Dark. The remains of the shard, almost drained of energy, a piece of stone that would seem ordinary were one not aware of its nature.
"This is only a fragment," Kayle said. Her voice was low. She stared at the object in her palm as one looks at a puzzle piece that has finally clicked into place. "A sliver. A ghost of what once was."
She squeezed. The fragment cracked.
"And even so, see what it has done. A city besieged. An entire army moved by a single man with a scrap of power he didn't even truly understand." Her fingers closed tighter. The fragment crumbled into dust which the wind carried away. "This was what Mother faced. This was what she fought against when she left us and flew to the heavens."
Her voice changed. Lower. More personal.
"I remember her saying... when I was a child..." Kayle looked towards the horizon. "She said there were things in the world that could rewrite reality. That the magi had found shards of the world's blood and were using them as weapons. I thought they were stories to frighten us. Bedtime tales told in reverse."
The hand that had held the fragment opened. Empty. The remains of the runic dust already gone with the wind.
"They weren't stories." Her voice hardened again. The Protector was returning. "Every mage with uncontrolled power is a Valdric waiting to happen. Every lost fragment is a besieged city waiting to be destroyed. Mother knew this. Mother fought against this her entire life." Kayle's eyes lowered to the charred corpse. "And when I find the next one, and the next after him... there shall be no siege. There shall be no army. No chance of getting near a wall. I shall find them first. And I shall burn them before anyone has need to scream for aid."
Morgana heard it all. Standing twenty yards away, amidst the rubble, covered in the dust of a city she had saved from the inside whilst her sister saved it from the outside. And I saw in her face not rage, nor accusation, sadness. The sadness of hearing her sister find in the mage's destruction the justification to become more absolute, more distant, more convinced that the only path was to burn first and ask questions later.
Kayle spoke of 'Mother'. Not 'our mother'. Kayle no longer shared Mihira with Morgana. Mihira was her mother. The heritage was hers. The mission was hers.
Then, Ronas approached Kayle.
His face was a work of art in calculation disguised as loyalty. Blood on his white tunic, real, legitimate, earned in combat. The credibility of one who fought and bled, which made every word that left his mouth three times more dangerous than if he had stayed in the rear. I've seen this type use a scar as a curriculum vitae; every drop of blood is a coin he will exchange for influence later.
"Protector." His voice was respectful. Warm. The tone of someone addressing someone they admire and worry for. "I saw what you faced up there. I saw the power of that mage. And I saw you defeat him. Alone."
He let the word alone linger in the air. He did not press it. He didn't elaborate. He just let it sit. Like someone placing poison in food and waiting for the flavour to do the rest.
Kayle didn't reply. But her jaw tightened.
Ronas looked at the battlefield. At the wounded judicators. At the destruction around them. His expression was calculatively pensive.
"Do you know what worries me, Protector? It isn't our enemies' power. It is knowing that when you needed help most... when you screamed..." He shook his head slowly, as if bearing a sorrow he didn't wish to feel. "...the judicators were here. I was here. But the one who should have been at your side..."
He did not say the name. He didn't have to. His gaze shifted, almost imperceptibly, nearly as if by accident, with the precision of a marksman feigning to clean his weapon, towards Morgana, who was approaching across the field. And then he returned it to Kayle, his devotion intact.
"I know it isn't my place to say, Protector. The Redeemer has... her methods. Her priorities." The word priorities carried enough venom to kill a horse, wrapped in so much respect it sounded like a compliment. "I only hope that next time, you don't find yourself having to scream for someone who does not come. As for us... We shall come. Always."
And he moved off. Like someone who had said what needed saying and required no response. The job was done. The seed planted.
Kayle looked at Morgana.
Morgana was approaching her. Tired. Exhausted. Covered in the chaos of a city she had saved. And I saw Kayle's face change.
It wasn't just rage. Rage was the top layer, the easy one, the one that made sense, the one with a name. Beneath it, what truly existed was pain. I recognised that pain. I've seen it on too many faces, in too many lives, to mistake it for anything else. The pain of someone reaching out their hand in the dark and finding a void. The pain of someone who screamed for her sister in the most vulnerable moment she had and heard the name echo without reply. The pain of a promise, I shall always be by your side, broken by the only person in the world she would let close enough to break anything at all.
And the worst part of this pain is that it doesn't ask why. It doesn't want the explanation. It doesn't care that Morgana saved an entire city, that she prevented the wall from falling, that she saved hundreds of innocent folk, that she pulled families from the rubble whilst her sister fought in the sky. Pain only knows one thing: I called, and you did not come.
Kayle began walking towards Morgana. Every step heavy. The judicators stepped aside, watching. Ronas was behind, watching with more purpose.
And Morgana saw her sister walking towards her. She saw the face. Saw the fury on the surface. And she saw the heartache beneath, which Kayle would deny until her last breath.
I know what is going to happen with the bitter certainty of one who has lived this moment from both sides. Kayle wasn't going to ask how many families were saved. She wasn't going to ask how many women, children, and elderly folk she had rescued. She wasn't going to ask how many infiltrated mages were defeated. She was going to ask one thing alone: why did you not come when I called?
And any answer Morgana gave, however true, however justified, however right, was going to sound like an excuse to a sister who had screamed in the dark and had no one come. I know. I've been the one who screamed and had no one come. And I've been the one who didn't go when they should have. And both times, the explanation changed nothing. For pain does not listen to reason. It only listens to presence. And presence either exists, or it does not.
The distance between them was closing, pace by pace.
[And Kayle?]
[Neither of them is wrong.]
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💬 Author's Comment
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Okay… let's talk quickly about this chapter, because this was literally a case of: "Riot gave me a poem and said 'figure it out'" 😅
For those who don't know, everything that officially exists about Zephyr basically comes from a chant excerpt. That's it. There's no:
❓ explanation of who the army was
❔ who the infiltrators were
❓what power was involved
❔ nor exactly how the situation escalated
It's like receiving an epic trailer… without the movie.
So what I did here was take those few lines Riot Games gave me and try to build a situation that made tactical, emotional, and narrative sense at the same time.
Some important decisions I made:
✅ I transformed the "army" into an organized force with a truly menacing leader (because, let's face it, if Kayle asked for help, it wasn't just anything)
✅ I created mages infiltrated within the city, because the text speaks of a "secret force," and that needed to have real weight
✅ I gave Morgana a concrete reason not to immediately go help Kayle, without it seeming like negligence
Basically:
👉 Kayle fighting a visible battle
👉 Morgana fighting an invisible battle
And both are right.
Because in the end, what the chant makes clear, even with very few words, is that the problem was never "who won the fight." It was:
"two right people… looking in opposite directions."
And that can't end well.
Anyway… that's it. I had to squeeze milk from a stone, make cheese, and even build a whole farm around it because Riot just throws crumbs and disappears for months 😭
But at the same time… this kind of loophole is what gives us the freedom to create something like this.
Now tell me:
Do you agree with Morgana's choice… or would you side with Kayle in this one?
(And yes, comments = fuel for me to keep writing 👀)