POV - Azra'il
Departure, in theory, is a simple, clean concept. It is the act of ceasing one's presence in a geographical location and initiating it in another. A full stop at the end of a sentence, the turning of a page, the beginning of a new, pristine paragraph. I had departed from countless places, countless lives, countless worlds. It ought to be a process as natural and devoid of emotion as a snake shedding its skin. However, the knowledge of our imminent departure hung over 'The Last Cup' with the weight of a storm that refuses to break, making the air thick, electric, and almost unbreathable with unsaid things. Routine, once a tedious comfort, had transformed into a silent countdown, each clink of a teacup a second ticking off the clock.
The news, of course, had spread like a plague. Vi, after her existential crisis on the roof, had probably told the others with all the subtlety of a steam-hammer hitting a pane of glass. And the result, especially in the chaotic sanctuary of my cellar, was a palpable shift in the atmosphere. The playful chaos of Powder and Ekko, the energy of pure discovery, had given way to a feverish, almost desperate intensity. They were no longer just inventing for fun; they were studying. Mining. Every visit to my workshop became a knowledge extraction session, every question, "What's the decay rate of an overloaded runic capacitor?", "How do you compensate for the instability of a brass gyroscope?", was freighted with the weight of a final chance.
They were trying, with a touching and profoundly irritating desperation, to bottle as much of me as they could before the well ran dry forever. It was flattering, in a way that massaged a part of my ego I preferred to pretend didn't exist. And it was depressing, a reminder that all bonds, no matter how strong, are by nature, transient.
On that particular afternoon, the chaos reached a new peak of bittersweet genius. I watched them, side-by-side at their respective workbenches, in a sort of competitive creative frenzy. They were like two binary stars, caught in each other's orbit, each pulling and pushing the other into brighter, more ambitious, and infinitely more dangerous trajectories.
Ekko, more serious and focused than I had ever seen him, called me over, his voice low but vibrating with a contained excitement. "Master Azra'il. Come and see."
I approached, braced for the best and the worst. His project was no toy, no simple tool. It was audacious. A thick, worn wooden plank, its surface covered in an intricate web of interlocking gears, copper coils, and, at its centre, an unstable gyroscope he had assembled from the cannibalised parts of an old, expensive Piltovan clock tower.
"I call it the Zero Drive," he said, with a quiet pride that was almost painful in its sincerity. His voice was that of an academic presenting a thesis, not a Zaunite street kid showing off his new skateboard. "The theory is to use targeted hex-frequency pulses, synchronised with the gyro, to create a temporary, localised pocket of levitation. I can't sustain it for more than two seconds yet, and the steering capability is, at best, optimistic and bordering on suicidal."
He positioned the board on the clean floor, twisted a dial made from a bottle cap, and the whole thing came to life with a loud, vibrating hum that made my teeth ache. The board lifted about six inches off the floor, hovering with a terrifying instability. It floated erratically to the left for exactly two seconds, slammed hard into a stack of metal crates, and then dropped with a dull thud, letting out a shower of sparks.
Failure? Objectively, yes. It was a loud and dangerous failure.
Brilliant? Absolutely. His genius was breathtaking.
"The vibration is your problem," I said, nudging the smoking board with my foot. "You have a single source of thrust, but none for counter-stabilisation. It's like trying to fly by flapping only one wing. You'll spin in circles until you crash. Think of a bird, you fool. Two wings. One for thrust, the other for balance. You need a second, smaller gyroscope, maybe even a third, spinning on the opposite axes to counteract the first's vectorial precession. Stability comes not from a single force, but from the balance between multiple ones."
Ekko's eyes widened, a new galaxy of equations and possibilities opening up in his mind. He didn't even say thank you, a sign of true respect among inventors. He just grabbed the board and began to scrawl new diagrams on a piece of scrap metal with a shard of charcoal. The lesson had been absorbed.
In contrast to Ekko's cosmic ambition, Powder's project was intensely, painfully, personal. She had been working on something for days, hiding it from me with a secrecy that was unusual for her explosively open nature. That day, while Ekko was lost in his calculations, she finally revealed it, holding it out in both hands as if it were a wounded bird.
"It's a… farewell present," she said, her voice low, the words difficult. "For her."
It was a small automaton in the shape of a crow, built from bits of scrap she had meticulously polished for hours, tiny screws looted from old watches, and delicate cogs. It was clumsy, imperfect in every way. One wing of recycled tin was slightly longer than the other. Its head was tilted at a perpetually curious angle, and its eyes were two different-coloured glass beads she must have found in the Sump.
"It's for the Mother Raven," she whispered, referring to the nickname she had heard me use for Morgana. "So that she has a crow that… that doesn't have to fly away from her."
I felt a strange tightness in my chest, a systemic failure in my emotional defences. A miscalculation. A variable I had not foreseen. "Wind it up, let's see if this little crow of yours works."
With trembling fingers, she fitted the key and turned it. The clockwork bird came to life. The metal wings flapped clumsily, but persistently. Its head tilted, and it emitted a small, hoarse mechanical "caw", the sound produced by a modified tin whistle I had taught her how to make.
It was an objectively flawed device. Inefficient. Noisy. Without any practical purpose.
And, in that moment, holding it in my hand, it was the most perfect creation I had seen in all my lives.
Later, as the light began to fade outside, I decided it was time for my own reluctant 'inheritance'. The passing of the torch, or in our case, the soldering iron. I guided the two of them through my 'graveyard of bad ideas', pointing to each failed prototype like a morbid museum guide.
"This suicidal toaster," I said, pointing, "taught me about the critical importance of thermal regulation and the fact that bread can, indeed, reach escape velocity if properly motivated, creating a carbohydrate projectile. A valuable lesson. This cleaning robot that developed a deep and personal hatred of feet taught me about the dangerous limits of simple-matrix programming. And the Kettle…" I paused, the memory of that spectacular implosion still painfully vivid. "…taught me about the humble, inevitable, and scientifically fascinating force of catastrophic structural failure."
I handed them a worn notebook, the pages stained with grease, tea, and likely a few drops of my own blood from work-related injuries. "Here. It contains the detailed notes on about fifty-two spectacular failures. It is the most valuable textbook you will ever read in any fancy Piltovan academy. Learning to succeed is easy; any fool can eventually stumble upon the right answer. Learning to 'fail well', to dissect a disaster, to extract every drop of knowledge from an explosion… that is what separates the amateurs from the masters. Now the workshop and this graveyard are yours. My only rule is: try not to blow up the entire city block all at once. Do it in stages. It's more polite to the neighbours."
The farewell in the cellar was quick and unceremonious, just the way I liked it. Ekko offered me a firm nod, a gesture between two inventors who shared the same language. "We'll miss you, Master Azra'il," he said, and the damned word "Master" caught me by surprise, an unexpected low blow I was not prepared to defend against.
Powder, however, had no such control, nor such formality. Her shoulders were shaking, and silent tears were streaming freely from under her goggles, leaving clean tracks on her soot-stained face. And before I could raise my defences or take a step back, she hugged me. Tightly.
My entire body went rigid as a board. It was an instinctual reaction, that of a cornered animal. Panic. The voices of a thousand lives screamed in my head: 'Attachment is weakness. Physical contact is a vulnerability. Affection is the prelude to the pain of loss.' My first impulse was to push her away, to create distance, to re-establish control. It's what I always did.
But then, another voice, more recent and calmer, overrode the chaos. Morgana's voice. The memory of her gentle touch, of her patient smiles, of her stubborn, unshakeable conviction that feeling was not a system flaw, but the very essence of existence. I remembered her telling me, on some random evening, "Sometimes, the greatest strength is simply allowing yourself to be vulnerable."
Damn her. Damn her and her contagious wisdom.
I was still panicking. I still felt as if I were violating some fundamental law of my own survival. But, for the first time in a very, very long time… I did not pull away.
Hesitantly, like an automaton learning a movement for which it was not programmed, I raised my arms. Awkwardly, I placed my hands on her back. And against all my instincts, I hugged her back.
Her hug was small, desperate, the hug of a child afraid of losing one of the few anchors in her life. Mine was stiff, clumsy, the carapace of an ancient creature trying to remember how to be gentle. It was not a perfect hug. It was a collision of frailties. And it only lasted a few seconds.
When she finally let go, she pulled back, rubbing her eyes on the back of her hand, suddenly embarrassed. I too stepped back, feeling as though I had just run a marathon.
"Okay. Right. That's enough physical contact," I said, my voice hoarser than usual, the sarcasm returning like a familiar shield but less convincing than before. "Feelings are a biohazard and they ruin the fabric of one's clothes."
But we both knew something had changed in that dark, cluttered cellar. A small wall, inside of me, had finally crumbled. And the feeling was, to my absolute horror, strangely like relief.
That night, the quiet of the shop felt heavier than usual. Morgana was sitting in an armchair, the gentle glow of the hearth dancing on her face as she read. I sat at a desk in the light of a single lamp, but instead of working on some project, I found myself staring at a blank piece of paper, a pen in hand.
I picked up the pen. And I began to write.
"What are you doing?" Morgana's voice pulled me from my concentration. I hadn't even heard her approach. She was standing beside me, holding two steaming mugs of tea. She placed one next to me.
I finished the letter, folded it precisely, and without a word, pushed Powder's small clockwork crow across the table towards her.
"This is for you. From Powder. Apparently, I am just the messenger and the tech support for the wind-up mechanism."
Morgana picked up the small automaton with a reverent care. Her fingers, so capable of conjuring shadow and pain, traced the clumsy shape of the bird with a heart-breaking tenderness. When she wound it up, and the crow flapped its recycled-tin wings and emitted its hoarse, mechanical "caw", a genuine, unguarded smile lit up her face, making her whole being seem softer.
"It's…" she whispered, her voice thick. "...the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."
Objectively, it was an engineering abomination. Inefficient. Unbalanced. No aerodynamics. And in that moment, watching Morgana's rare and completely disarmed smile, I agreed with her. It was absolutely perfect.
"They came into our lives like a spring storm, didn't they?" she said, looking at the crow in her hands. "Loud, chaotic, and full of a stubborn life that refuses to be crushed."
"I'd say more like an infestation of particularly intelligent and explosive porings," I replied, my tone softer than usual. "They multiply, make noise, and leave grease stains on the furniture."
"I will miss them," Morgana confessed, and the simplicity of the phrase carried the weight of her centuries. "I will miss this. This… home."
"Homes are way-stations," I said, an instinctual defence, a truth I clung to with tooth and nail. "Lessons. Temporary rooms. Nothing more."
She placed her hand over mine, which was still resting on the sealed letter. Her touch was warm and real. "Perhaps. Or just perhaps, some homes leave a deeper mark on the traveller's soul than others. What have you written?"
I hesitated. To show her was an act of vulnerability I did not practice. It was to expose a calculation, a manipulation. But her gaze was not curious; it was understanding. With a resigned sigh that sounded dangerously like defeat, I handed her the letter.
She read it. Her face was a study in contained emotion. She saw through my sharp words, my forced pragmatism, and she saw the intent I had tried so hard to hide. The care. The desperate, logical final act of a reluctant teacher.
"You say you don't care, little one," she said, her voice full of a love that still made me deeply uncomfortable. "But your actions… they tell a very, very different story. This letter is not pragmatism. It is hope."
I took the letter back, grumbling. "It's… resource optimisation. A waste of raw talent is inefficient. As simple as that."
I sealed the letter, ready to be delivered by Rixa the next day, addressed to my two idiot-clients at the Academy, Jayce and Viktor.
It was, as I insisted to myself while I sealed the wax, a simple matter of efficiency. I repeated it, over and over, like a mantra.
And I almost, almost, managed to believe it.
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Author's Notes 💬
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Guys… I swear I started this poll thinking you were going to vote for "obvious" names on the table. Something predictable. Something normal.
But then you went and said: "no, not today"
So far, the most voted character that readers think could be a romantic partner for Morgana is simply Sett's mother.
Yes. His mother. Sett's. 😂
And all I can do is look at that and think:
"Okay… my readers are amazing. And a little dangerous. But mostly amazing."
Seriously, I LOVE how you think outside the box, outside the lore, outside collective sanity. This poll has become a real-time sociological experiment and I'm 100% entertained. Keep being strangely specific, creative and chaotically brilliant, that's why I like you so much 🖤
Now keep voting. I'm going to pretend I'm in control of the situation.
(pretending is the key word) 😌✨