Liam had spent enough time working with natural energy to know what it felt like when it had opinions.
In the HxH world it was always neutral. Ambient, diffuse, present everywhere in proportion to how much life was present, without preference or personality. It pooled in forests and coastlines and the places where living things had gathered for a long time, but it did not reach out. It did not watch.
The wind moving through the Black Alley's lower corridors was different.
It was subtle. Barely there. More the impression of attention than the fact of it, the way you might feel watched and turn around to find nothing, except that in this case something was actually there. The natural energy field of Runeterra had, in addition to its ambient density, a quality of being organized. In the way that very old water acquires a shape from the channel it has been flowing through for centuries.
Natural spirits, the books might have called them. Or demigods, in places where the organizing principle had been at work long enough to develop personality, form, belief systems attached to it.
Ionia, somewhere on this planet, had something vast and ancient at its center: a spirit whose body was the continent itself. The places further from that concentration had smaller presences, younger, less fixed. In some places they were barely emergent — a flickering awareness like an eye just beginning to open.
And then there was this city.
Piltover and Zaun had once been called Oshra Vaz'uan, a name that people in the lower city still used when they wanted to say something the upper city had tried to take from them. The canal accident that divided it had happened hundreds of years ago. The stories said the casualties would have been considerably worse except that a guardian presence had intervened — spent itself significantly in the intervention — and since then had been quiet.
The wind guardian of the coast. A blue bird. Sailors' goddess.
Liam had not seen a blue bird. No miracle had materialized. The sense of attention was still there but behaving more like curiosity than agency, the way you might observe an interesting visitor without quite deciding to introduce yourself.
He filed this under: worth revisiting, when there was time.
Vi hit the door of The Last Drop at a pace that suggested she had forgotten it was a door.
The bar was dark. Not the comfortable dark of a bar doing good business late in the evening, but the specific dark of a place that has been closed in a hurry and not opened since. The lights that ran along the bar counter were off. The usual noise was completely absent.
"Vander!" Vi went further in. "Vander, where—"
"Hm." The voice came from a corner.
There were no lamps lit back there, but Liam and Shizuku had both looked in that direction the moment they walked through the door. The air moved differently in that corner. The breathing was careful, the kind of careful that someone does when they are managing pain without wanting to display it.
Click. The overhead light tubes activated in sequence, filling the bar with the flat yellow light of working hours. It illuminated a broad-shouldered man sitting against the wall, one hand holding his opposite shoulder, blood moving steadily between his fingers.
"Vander," Vi said, and stopped.
Mylo and Claggor came in behind her and also stopped. Nobody ran over immediately. The man was breathing. The wound was real but he was sitting upright. They established these facts in approximately two seconds and then Mylo said something quiet that was not quite a curse, and Claggor put one hand over his mouth and kept it there.
Powder had Vi's hand.
After several minutes of conversation that moved in the efficient and non-sequential way of people who know each other well enough to skip the background, the shape of what had happened emerged.
The light curtain had appeared over the lower city at the same time it appeared over Piltover. Vander had seen it. He had watched the first three episodes from the square outside the bar with everyone else, and then he had gone to find Silco before the Enforcers did.
Not to warn Silco. Not to help him. To get between Silco and the law enforcement response that was almost certainly already forming on the east side of the bridge, because the one thing Vander had been doing for years was standing between the lower city's worst impulses and the upper city's worst responses, and the light curtain had given Piltover Enforcement detailed advance knowledge of a Shimmer factory operating in the rift.
If he had not gone, the collision would have been immediate and decisive and bloody in the specific way that decisive collisions between Shimmer-enhanced fighters and Enforcement teams tend to be. He had gone. He had put himself between the two parties and absorbed the energy of the confrontation for long enough to get them to a temporary truce.
The shoulder and arm were the cost. Both sides had made contributions.
"Temporary," Vander said. The word had the sound of a man who has spent a long time being very clear-eyed about the limits of the tools available to him. "The factory is sealed. Silco's people are still there. Give it a week."
"Silco doesn't stop," Vi said.
"No," Vander said. "He doesn't."
Jayce, who had been absorbing all of this with the particular expression of someone whose mental model of the lower city as a place populated by brutal and unsubtle people was being revised in real time, said: "What about the law enforcement officers? Did you—did they—"
Vander looked at him. "They didn't tear anyone to pieces," he said. "If that's what you were about to ask."
Jayce closed his mouth.
Liam walked toward the corner.
He walked with the unhurried steadiness of someone moving through a space they intend to rearrange, which was what Vander felt about three seconds before he arrived. The body's threat response is faster than the conscious mind's ability to contextualize the threat, and Vander's threat response was decades trained and had no interest in waiting for explanation. Every muscle in his frame shifted into the combat-ready configuration without his permission. His pupils expanded. His teeth clenched.
He did not move.
The young man's hand settled on his shoulder. The touch was light. From it came something warm, not heat in the way the sun is hot, but heat in the way that the first decent meal after several days without food is warm — purposeful, restorative, specific. The laceration on his shoulder closed from the inside. The entry points on his arm, three of them, followed in sequence.
He watched this happen with the expression of a man who has decided that if he is having a hallucination, he is going to observe it carefully rather than panic about it.
Liam withdrew his hand and looked at Jayce. "You wanted to do the experiment."
Shizuku already had the equipment on the nearest table: the blue crystals, the housing, the notes. She arranged them with the efficiency of someone who has helped set up for enough experiments to know which elements go in which order.
The bar had filled during the conversation.
People from the rift had come in: neighbors, regulars, people who had seen the light curtain and heard that Vander was back and wanted to assess the situation with their own eyes. The bar settled into the specific energy of a community in the middle of deciding how worried it needs to be.
Vander touched his own arm. The skin was intact. No residual tenderness. He looked at Liam with the question he had not yet asked.
"Healing," Shizuku said, to Vi and Claggor and Powder, who were also looking. "A version of it. The body helps itself; he just pushes it in the right direction."
"He heard of that," Jayce said, before he could stop himself. "In old accounts of magic. A healer with—" He looked at Liam's entirely non-lilac complexion. "You're not that healer."
"I'm not."
"Is it magic or something else."
"Something else. Are you ready?"
Jayce looked at the table. The crystal and the housing and the notes, all present. He sat down.
"I've been ready for six years," he said.
The bar watched.
This was not an unusual thing to watch things in the lower city, but it was a less common thing to watch a Piltover inventor arrange hextech equipment on a tavern table while six people from the upper and lower cities respectively watched him work. The atmosphere had the quality of a gathering that has not yet decided what it is.
Jace looked at his notes. He looked at the housing. He looked at the crystal.
He picked up the first rune tool.
In the ceiling overhead, the bar's working lights made a small sound, a flicker that passed in under a second, as natural energy in the ambient field touched the activated crystal and recognized something.
Liam watched the sequence with the specific attention he brought to techniques he was reverse-engineering. The rune order. The energy pathways. The activation sequence. This was not divine script in the notation he knew it, but the underlying grammar was the same. Different alphabet, same language. The stranger on the mountain had known it completely; Jayce knew the shape of it from a memory burned in during a blizzard, and was finding his way back to fluency from that imprint.
It was, Liam thought, genuinely impressive.
He also watched the door.
Because two minutes ago, a man in the crowd had stopped looking at the experiment and started walking toward the exit. A man with dreadlocks, ordinary posture, no reason to leave that Liam had not quietly provided. The Star Mark Liam had placed during the walk through the rift was doing its work: guiding the man toward the canal, toward the sound of the wind, toward whatever remained of the goddess of this coastline.
An offering, in the old sense. Blood, freely given, at a site connected to her attention.
He was curious what would happen next.
He turned back to the experiment and kept watching Jayce's hands.