She stood near the Star Gate with six golden wings spread behind her.
Two rose high above her shoulders, two flared wide at her sides, and two hung lower, their feathers shaped from radiant power rather than flesh. Gold light ran along the edges of her armor. Her blond hair fell around her face, in each hand she held a sword, one her own, one once belonging to her sister, both burning with celestial fire.
Kayle.
Before her, the Star Gate towered over the platform like a wound cut through the universe. It linked Targon Prime to Mount Targon.
Kayle could not see what her mother and Xineos saw.
He stood beside the gate, no longer the planet-sized being she had glimpsed earlier from the high towers. Now he had reduced himself to the size of an original Aspect. That still made him enormous compared to her. His armor glowed with the light of a sovereign sun.
Mihira floated to Kayle's other side.
She manifested as a vast humanoid shape, amorphous at the edges, as if sacred flame had taken the memory of a woman and stretched it into something higher. Six white feathered wings grew from her back, and eyes rested across those wings, opening and closing in slow, silent awareness. Six arms extended from her body, each moving with different purpose. She had no legs. From the waist down, her form dissolved into sacred fire.
Centuries ago, her mortal body had been transformed by celestial magic when the Aspect withdrew from Runeterra and remained in Targon Prime.
Kayle no longer missed that body.
At least, she told herself that.
Mihira sometimes seemed to.
It was never obvious. Her mother did not speak of regret. She did not stare at her old reflection or mourn what had been burned away. But every now and then, when she looked at Kayle, there was a pause. A quiet measurement. As if she saw the face of the child she had held in mortal arms and remembered the weight of that life.
Kayle had spent years trying to kill that part of herself.
Mortal weakness.
Mortal hesitation.
Mortal love.
She was not like the other Aspects. She had not been chosen from among mortals and filled as a vessel. She had been born from one mortal and one Aspect, a daughter of flesh and celestial flame. A contradiction. A bridge. A mistake, some had whispered, though never loudly enough for her not to hear.
She had wanted to extinguish the mortal side.
Her mother had stopped her.
So had Xineos.
But for very different reasons.
Mihira believed Kayle's mortal half was part of her existence, not a stain upon it. To erase it, her mother said, would not make her purer. It would make her something else. Something she had never been meant to become.
Xineos cared nothing for wholeness.
To him, Kayle's mortal nature was useful.
She could enter Runeterra without needing a host.
Her body broke the rules. Xineos disliked that mortal element in her, but he liked the loophole it created.
He did not want her to replace Mihira as the Aspect of Justice either.
That decision belonged more to Justice than to him, and Kayle knew it. But a God-King could make preference feel very close to law.
Mihira looked at Xineos now with open distaste.
A rejection before he had even spoken.
Kayle understood why a breath later.
Xineos lifted one massive hand toward the Star Gate.
"Xerath..."
——————
Far below, in the ruins of Vekaura, Taliyah pressed herself under the dock arches with Sivir half-slumped beside her.
The battle had become too large to understand all at once.
From where she hid, she saw pieces.
Nasus striking with his staff while the giant crocodilian monster hammered at him with a crescent blade. Jax leaping through broken stone to strike at Xerath whenever the blue magus descended. Master Yi moving as a green blur through falling dust. Karma shining in the air, her shields catching blasts that would have killed anyone beneath them.
The city shook again and again.
Sivir leaned against a cracked pillar, pale and breathing through pain. The Chalicar rested near her hand.
...
Then the sky spoke.
"Xerath."
The voice filled the air with authority so heavy that every sound beneath it seemed to kneel. The battle stopped. Jax landed on a broken wall and looked up. Yi froze mid-step. Karma turned sharply. Even the massive crocodilian Ascended halted with his blade raised, rage still twisting his face but not enough to ignore the voice.
Xerath floated above the ruins, blue light flickering around him.
"Who dares?"
"What you seek," the voice said, "the weapon that was given by Targon, bring it to Mount Targon."
Sivir went still, Taliyah looked at her.
The voice continued.
"I have a bargain that will interest you."
For one heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then the crocodilian's crescent blade began to glow.
The light was gold, sharp and heavy, waking inside the metal like a buried sun.
The crocodilian roared.
Not in anger this time.
In pain.
His hand tightened on the weapon as the glow crawled up his arm and burned through the cracks in his Ascended form. The huge warrior staggered, claws carving deep marks into the stone.
Across the ruins, Nasus's staff answered.
Golden light spread along its head and shaft. Nasus inhaled sharply, his calm breaking as the same power lashed through him. He held on, but Taliyah saw his shoulders tense, saw the way the light hurt him too.
Then Sivir's weapon ignited.
The Chalicar blazed brighter than both.
Taliyah cried out and threw an arm over her face. The pressure struck her chest and shoved her back against the arch. Stone cracked behind her. Sivir screamed.
The sound tore through Taliyah more than the light did.
"Sivir!"
She tried to reach her.
A field of golden force pushed her away.
Sivir had let go of the weapon, but it did not matter. The power still moved through her. She curled around herself, teeth clenched, one hand clawing at the stone as if she could drag herself out of her own blood.
"What is happening?" Taliyah shouted.
Sivir could not answer.
The battle above changed in a single instant.
Nasus, the crocodilian, and Xerath all looked toward the docks.
Directly toward them.
Taliyah's stomach dropped.
Nasus's voice crashed across the city.
"Run!"
She grabbed for Sivir again, but the golden field shoved her harder. Her boots scraped over stone. She slammed one hand into the ground and raised a ridge behind herself to stop from being thrown farther back.
Xerath rose.
Higher.
Higher still.
He climbed into the sky until Jax and Yi could not reach him, until Nasus and his brother were far below. Karma flew after him, green light streaming from her hands. She struck him with focused blasts of spirit power. They hit. They hurt him. Taliyah saw Xerath's glow flicker under the attacks.
But they did not stop him.
Blue energy gathered between Xerath's hands.
Not a bolt nor a beam.
A sun of arcane force.
Karma turned sharply and rushed back toward the docks.
"Taliyah!" she shouted.
Taliyah could barely hear her over the growing hum.
Karma landed between Sivir and the sky, both hands raised. A shield formed above the docks. Then another. Then another. Layer after layer of green light stacked between them and Xerath, filling the air with translucent barriers.
Taliyah tried to crawl toward Sivir again.
The golden pressure shoved her back.
Sivir writhed on the stone, the Chalicar hovering slightly above the ground now, spinning slowly, every edge shining.
Karma's body began to glow brighter.
She was using too much power.
Taliyah could feel it. The air shook around her. The dock arches groaned. The river itself rippled away from the pressure.
Xerath's blue sun condensed.
...
...
...
Xerath fired.
The beam came down as a column of blue destruction.
The first shield vanished instantly.
The second cracked and broke.
The third held for less than a breath.
Then the beam punched through them one by one, each barrier bursting in green fragments. The entire section of the city around the docks exploded under the pressure. Towers collapsed. Stone melted. Boats shattered. The river rose in a wall of steam.
Taliyah pulled stone over herself, but the force ripped most of it away.
She could not reach Sivir.
She could not even stand.
Karma floated between the beam and the docks, shining completely green now. Her arms trembled. Her hair whipped around her face. Shield after shield formed and broke, formed and broke, each one closer to Sivir than the last.
Xerath burned brighter.
Blue light swallowed the sky.
Karma pushed back with everything she had.
The last shield formed.
It was thicker than the others, layered with symbols Taliyah could not read, pulsing with Karma's full strength.
For a moment, it held.
Sivir's scream changed.
Golden energy surged from her body, not around her, but through her. Her eyes opened, blazing with a light that did not look like pain anymore. It looked like memory. Like someone ancient had woken inside blood it had no right to command.
Her hand closed around the Chalicar.
The weapon spun once.
Sivir rose to one knee.
The injured mercenary should not have been able to move. Her arm was broken. Her body was half-dead. But she lifted the Chalicar guided by something beyond muscle.
The last of Karma's shield cracked.
Sivir shouted.
The voice was hers and not hers.
She threw the weapon.
It flew into the beam just as Karma's final shield shattered.
The Chalicar spun at impossible speed, its four curved blades becoming a golden ring. It struck the blue column head-on.
The world stopped.
Gold met blue.
The Chalicar held against the beam, rotating faster, carving into Xerath's power. Energy gathered around the collision point, swelling outward in a sphere that bent the air, bent the river, bent the ruins, bent every shadow.
Xerath's voice tore from the sky.
"Setaka!!!"
Sivir looked up, blood running down her face, one eye blazing gold.
The voice that came from her was cold.
"Sivir."
Then everything exploded.
The blast swallowed the docks first.
It ripped through the arches, tore open the riverbank, and flung broken stone into the air. The shockwave raced through Vekaura, lifting dust from every ruin, snapping dead pillars, flattening the remains of walls already weakened by battle. Blue and gold light twisted together in a storm so bright that Taliyah lost sight of everything.
She felt herself thrown backward.
Stone answered her panic too late.
The last thing she heard before the roar drowned everything was the Chalicar screaming through the heart of the beam.