The morning after our pact in the garden of poisons, the city of Knot Klage looked the same, but something in me had shifted. I saw the world through a new filter, a veil of intrigue that tinted the sunlight a different colour. An empire's breath is measured not in its armies, but in its secrets. And we had been invited to breathe the thin air of its darkest lungs.
Azra'il, as always, showed no sign of the weight of our new alliance. She spent the morning at her furnace, humming a wordless melody that sounded like the friction of distant stars, a sound so ancient it seemed displaced coming from such young lips. I looked at her, at the certainty in her small gestures, at the way she seemed to understand the Noxian 'dance of power' with a familiarity that frightened me. It was as if she were already playing this game on a new board. For me, however, this was a road I had avoided for centuries, for I knew that every step upon it leaves scars on the soul, and I already carried enough of my own.
"Let's go," I said, when the midday sun was high, and the shadow of our duty had grown too long to be ignored.
We took our bag of remedies and a small case of tools. The path to the Stone Districts was a silent lesson in the nature of Noxus. We left behind the honest chaos of the Foundries District—the noise, the sweat, the open struggle for survival—and entered a realm of sterile order. Here, the streets were clean, the stones aligned, and the silence was not of peace, but of enforced discipline. It was the silence of a blade being sharpened, the quiet before the storm. And I understood. In Noxus, the true disorder, the true danger, did not live in the alleys, but behind the locked doors of the houses that looked so respectable.
We found the residence, an unadorned structure, indistinguishable from the others. But I felt the runes that enveloped it, woven not just to conceal, but to suffocate. They were spells of silence and forgetfulness. A safe house. A disguised prison, designed to contain a secret that was rotting from within.
I knocked on the dark wooden door. The sound was muffled, swallowed by the door's magic. We waited in silence for a moment that stretched, watched by blind windows. Finally, I heard the sound of multiple bolts being drawn.
The door was opened by a burly man with a scarred face and the crest of House Vorth discreetly embroidered on his dark tunic. He was no steward; he was a guard, his eyes sweeping the street behind us before they fixed on me.
"The Shadow Healer?" he asked, his voice a low growl. I nodded. His eyes moved to Azra'il, who stared back, unblinking. "And the apprentice. Inside. Quickly."
We entered, and he locked the door behind us with a series of heavy, final clicks. The house was silent, the air stuffy and smelling of sickness, the scent of decomposing magic.
"He's in the back room," the guard said. "Hasn't made much noise today. That worries me more than the screaming."
He led us down a dark corridor to a closed door and stood guard outside, his hand never straying from the pommel of his sword. The message was clear: we were the healers, but we were also prisoners in this place until our work was done.
I pushed the door, and it opened with a creak that sounded like a groan. The room was in a perpetual twilight, the heavy drapes blocking all light. And there, in a chair, was Kaelen. He was a ghost within his own life.
He had once been a strong man; I saw it in the broad shoulders that now slumped under an invisible weight, in the framework of his bones that seemed too large for the flesh that covered it. A proud tree, now being consumed from within by a disease that drank its very sap. He raised his head slowly, and what little light seeped into the room revealed the damage. The veins on his neck and hands stood out, black and branching like a venomous vine growing beneath his skin. His flesh had a friable, grey quality, as if it were losing its vitality. His pain was a physical presence in the room, a feverish heat that made the air throb.
I approached, my steps deliberately slow and soft on the worn carpet. Azra'il followed, a pace behind, her blue eyes already analysing everything from the damp on the walls to the rhythm of the man's breathing.
"Kaelen," I said, my voice calm. "Lady Vorth sent us."
He just nodded, his eyes vacant and filled with an exhaustion that went beyond the physical.
"If you will permit us," I said, stopping at a respectful distance. "We would like to examine you."
He stared at me for a long moment, appraising, perhaps looking for any sign of deception. Finally, he gave a short, almost imperceptible nod. With his tacit permission, I drew closer, but did not touch him. Instead, I asked him to place his hand on the table, palm up. It was a soldier's hand, covered in calluses and scars, but now it trembled with a weakness that did not belong to it.
Instead of taking his pulse, I hovered my own hand over his, palm down, making no contact. I closed my eyes and extended my perception, not to his blood flow, but to his aura, his magic, his field of life energy.
What I felt was unsettling and unlike anything I had ever touched. A healthy aura is like a soft, even warmth, a constant light. His was like a starving, uncontrolled furnace. And within that feverish fire, there were… voids. Small pockets of nothing, of cold, that seemed to be multiplying. I didn't sense a spirit or a curse nested within him. I sensed hunger. Something inside him was ravenous, and it was devouring him. But it had no soul. It was hollow, mechanical.
"This is not a common sickness or plague," I said, withdrawing my hand, the echo of that unnatural hunger sending a chill through me. "This is consuming you. Something is eating your magic from the inside out."
Azra'il, who had been observing in silence, stepped forward, her eyes fixed on Kaelen with a clinical intensity that made even the tormented mage flinch. She did not need my analysis; she already seemed to have her own theory.
"I need a sample," she declared, blunt.
Kaelen shrank back, startled. "A sample? Of what?"
"Of what's killing you," Azra'il replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She opened her small tool case, which held thin silver needles and crystal vials sealed with runes. "I need a sample of your blood and of the ashen residue on your skin to understand the composition of your… problem."
Without waiting for a full reply, and with a speed that was bordering on inhuman, she used a needle to gently prick his fingertip, collecting a single drop of dark blood in a crystal vial. The blood wasn't just red; I could see tiny, feverish, and erratic points of light pulsing within it, like dying stars.
Then, with a small obsidian spatula, she carefully scraped a sample of the grey, cracked skin from his arm. The 'ash' fell onto the waxed paper she'd prepared, not like dust, but like fine, metallic granules that glinted dully.
"Fascinating," she murmured to herself, sealing the samples. "The structure is almost… alive. A form of biomechanical alchemy." She turned to Kaelen, her eyes bright with an intellectual excitement that was almost frightening. "You aren't sick. You have been… upgraded. Defectively."
She asked Kaelen to perform the simplest of gestures: to light a small flame in the palm of his hand. With great effort, he did so. As soon as his magic began to flow, the reaction was immediate. The veins in his arm glowed brighter, and a groan of pain escaped his lips.
Azra'il watched, impassive. "There it is," she said, pointing. "It's a mechanism. Inside you, Kaelen, there is an army. Imagine tiny, alchemical 'machines' that multiply. They sleep when you are at rest. But when you use your magic, they awaken and devour the power at the source, before it can form your spell. What you feel as weakness is, in fact, hunger. *Their* hunger. And this grey rot… it is the waste they leave behind. Their excrement. You are being eaten alive to fuel an empty forge."
The brutality and precision of the diagnosis did what none of my gentle words could. It broke him.
Kaelen collapsed into sobs, and the truth finally came out, a torrent of terrified confession. The secret expedition. The Shuriman tomb. The urn that contained not a spirit, but a pulsing, metallic dust. The arrogant attempt to understand and replicate the power of the Ascended, to create super-soldiers for Noxus. And the catastrophic failure. The 'plague' wasn't an enemy weapon. It was the result of their own unchecked ambition, their own creation turned against its creators.
"There were others," he whispered, his voice broken. "Two… died last week. And the worst part… the worst part is what happens at the end." His eyes were wide with a terror that went beyond his own death. "When the body can no longer take it and falls apart… it releases a cloud. A fine, grey dust. And if another mage is nearby…" He shuddered violently. "That's how I caught it. The laboratory… when Varok disintegrated into dust, I breathed it in…"
My blood ran cold. It wasn't just a parasite. It was a disease. Contagious, and apparently, terrifyingly efficient.
"The spores seek the nearest magical resonance," Azra'il said, the conclusion cold and immediate in her voice. "It's not a random contamination. It's targeted reproduction. Each dead host becomes a spore bomb, designed to infect the next available power source." Her eyes narrowed. "This is not just a failed weapon. It's a self-replicating pandemic weapon. And every death makes it stronger by spreading it."
Now I understood. Lady Vorth's urgency, the desperate secrecy. It wasn't just about a sick agent or a rival house's weapon. It was about containment. If the Noxian High Command discovered that one of her secret circles, operating under her orders, had accidentally created a contagious magical plague, the consequences would be cataclysmic. The punishment for such negligence—or treason—would be merciless. House Vorth, however ancient, would be incinerated as an example. Her entire network of influence, all of her secrets, would go to the grave with her.
I felt now was a deep aversion to being once again a piece on this chessboard of power games that I so despised. I saw the path ahead, covered not with snow, but with the ashes of consequences. Every empire, I was reminded, carries the seeds of its own destruction. It seemed House Vorth had cultivated theirs in a Shuriman tomb.
While I felt the weight of our new and terrible complicity, in Azra'il I saw a dangerous glint of pure intellectual passion in her eyes. She did not see an impending tragedy or a political web. She saw a fascinating mechanism, an engineering challenge of the highest order.
"Removal is impossible," she mused, her voice low, more to herself than to us. Her fingers traced invisible patterns on the wooden table, as if sketching runic diagrams. "These little 'machines' or these 'seeds'... they're integrated into his bloodflow, bonded to his very life essence. Trying to rip them out would be like trying to separate the salt from seawater. You would destroy everything."
"So we have to find a way to contain them," I insisted, horrified at the prospect of Kaelen disintegrating into a cloud of arcane death in front of us, in this very house. "Stop them from spreading."
Azra'il's blue eyes finally met mine, and they were shining with the fever of discovery, a light so intense it seemed to belong to another world, to a forge where stars were made. "Contain? Morgana, you don't understand! This is ancient Shuriman engineering, however flawed! It's like finding a draft of a divine masterpiece, smudged and torn, but still holding the spark of creation. To contain it would be a waste. We aren't just going to contain it."
She stood up from her stool, her small body vibrating with an energy that seemed too large for it. Her face broke into a fierce, determined smile, the smile of a scientist who has just found the problem of a lifetime.
"We are going to fix it."
The audacity of the declaration left me speechless. Not just to cure, not just to stop, but to rewrite the very code of a plague created from the power of forgotten gods.
"And how do you plan to do that?" I asked, sceptical, but already knowing she would have an answer.
"Their code is simple: 'consume the host, then spread'," she explained, the pace of her words quickening. "We need to give them a new command, a more elegant one. For that, we need two things. First, a stasis agent, something that forces them into dormancy, a universal stop signal that not even their hunger can ignore. And second, a purification agent, a pulse of clean, ordered energy to rewrite the faulty code, teaching them to feed from an external source, or ideally, to become permanently inert."
She turned to me, the strategist handing a problem to her field specialist. "And this is where you come in. Your library of useless knowledge about herbs and minerals will finally have a high-level application. What in this world has the power to 'freeze' magic?"
I thought for a moment, searching my knowledge, the folklore of a thousand places. "There is a plant," I said slowly. "A Freljordian legend. The Frost-Poppy. It is said its pollen induces not sleep, but stasis. It can 'freeze' magical and biological processes for a short time."
"Perfect," she said, a gleam of approval in her eyes. "And for the 'rewrite'? We need a source of pure, ordered magic. The polar opposite of the corrupted Shuriman chaos. Something…"
"...celestial," I finished, understanding. The idea caused me a profound discomfort. It would mean using a part of myself, the heritage I fought so hard to suppress. "Or the closest thing we can find. A purified Demacian crystal, perhaps. Imbued with faith and order."
"Excellent," Azra'el said. "Frost-Poppy and a crystal of order. The rest is just… alchemy."
The cure was not in our bags. We would have to forge it. And for that, we would need ingredients we did not have. Which meant returning to the spider at the centre of the web. Returning to Lady Vorth.
The journey back to the apothecary was silent, each of us lost in our thoughts. I, pondering the danger of using my own essence and the morality of our alliance. Azra'il, I was certain, was already in her mind, in her laboratory, testing combinations and drawing refinement diagrams. As we entered our shop, the safety of its walls felt fragile, temporary. The world outside had become much larger and more dangerous, and we were now irrevocably at the centre of it all.