POV - Morgana
The water was not cold.
Cold is a word mortals invented to describe discomfort. This was something else. An absence of warmth so complete it felt like a philosophical statement, the universe reminding my flesh that it was merely borrowed, that the void had always been waiting to reclaim it. The touch did not prickle my skin. It passed through it like one ignoring a door, sinking straight into the bones, into the soul, silencing everything that dared to be warm and alive.
The sounds of the chamber, the crackling of braziers, Illaoi's breath, the ritual weight of that place, all vanished the instant the surface closed over our heads. We were swallowed by liquid silence, a stillness so thick it seemed to possess mass. The temple's blue-green light became a distant memory, a trembling smudge shrinking above us whilst the water pulled us down with the patience of one who knows it always wins.
It was not a fall. It was an accepted invitation. A slow, deliberate dive, as if the water itself were shepherding us towards its dark heart, not with haste, but with the quiet certainty of one who has done this before, countless times, with countless souls.
I felt Azra'il's hand in mine.
Small. Surprisingly warm. An anchor of life in this ocean of absence. It was the only real thing, the only reference point in a world that had dissolved into darkness and pressure. Her grip carried no panic. It carried presence. A silent affirmation I knew well, for it was the same mode of communication that had existed between us from the start: "I am here. You are not alone."
For a moment that stretched into a small eternity, nothing happened.
Only darkness. Silence. The sensation of sinking into a night that had learned to be liquid. And a part of me, that sceptical part forged in centuries of broken promises and revelations that never arrived, thought with the weariness of one who has seen too much:
That was when I felt the first touch.
It was not physical. Not in the way flesh recognises. It was a whisper against my essence, a current of pure intent passing through skin as if it were a mere formality, touching directly what lay beneath. My first thought was that it was merely the water, a peculiar eddy, a current with too much curiosity.
Then it came again. Stronger. This time, it was not a whisper, but a question.
Fingers made not of flesh, but of pressure and curiosity, traced the line of my arm, my shoulder. They were tentacles, yes, but not of matter. They were woven from the goddess's own will, extensions of a consciousness too vast to fit a single form.
In the absolute pitch black, they began to glow.
Strands of green-gold light, the same colour inhabiting Illaoi's eyes, materialised from nothing, weaving around me like a web of intent. They coiled around my ankles, my waist, fluid and inquisitive. Not to bind. To read. Every point of contact was a silent invasion, a question asked directly of my history. I felt them mapping my body, my visible scars and those that exist only where light does not reach.
Then, they found my wings.
The ethereal light traced their shape with the precision of one who is not deceived by illusions. The glamour I maintained, that gentle lie hiding what I was, seemed like clear glass to those fingers of light. They saw through it. They saw within.
And then they found the chains.
When the tentacles touched the cold iron binding my wings, a deep resonance vibrated through me, a low sound felt more than heard, like the lament of a submerged bell. The chains on my back responded to the touch, not with resistance, but with a metallic groan, ancient, weary. The tentacles did not attempt to break them.
They... listened.
They felt the pain of the forge. The resolve of the moment I bound them with my own hands. The centuries of weight. The constant doubt polishing them at every sunrise, at every decision, every time I looked at the sky and wondered if I had made the right choice.
They did not judge the prison.
They felt the reason for its existence. And perhaps, just perhaps, understood it better than anyone who has ever looked at me and seen only a fallen angel.
My instinct reacted before thought. The primordial reaction of a mother, that silent scream triggered when one realises their young might be in danger: Azra'il.
I turned in the suspended darkness, and the light of the tentacles wrapping me illuminated the scene.
The same was happening to her.
Strands of vibrant green light surrounded her, delicate yet firm, tracing her small body like scribes copying a rare manuscript. And the expression on her face...
The expression on her face stole the air I did not need to breathe.
There was no panic. No fear. Her blue eyes, impossibly bright in the ethereal light, were open and fixed on the tentacles coiling around her arm. She was studying them with that analytical curiosity I knew so well, the scientist encountering a completely new lifeform, already cataloguing, already formulating hypotheses, already transforming the extraordinary into data to be processed.
There was a tranquil acceptance in her posture. The stillness of one who has seen the impossible so many times it has become just another variable to observe, another phenomenon to understand.
It is impressive, I thought with that mixture of pride and sadness she always awoke in me, how she manages to turn even a divine intrusion into an experiment.
She felt my gaze and turned to me.
In that moment, in the ghostly underwater light, suspended between worlds, being read by a consciousness too ancient to name, our eyes met. And in that shared look, amidst the invasion, was perfect understanding. The type of communication that transcends words, existing only between souls that have already recognised one another:
"We are in this together."
The grip of her hand in mine became slightly firmer. I responded in kind.
Then, I felt a new movement.
A tentacle of light, thicker and brighter than the others, rose from my chest, passed my neck, and gently touched my forehead. Simultaneously, I saw another do the same to Azra'il. A crown of inquisitive light forming around our heads, as if the goddess were preparing a far deeper ritual of reading.
The instant the tentacle touched my forehead, the world came undone.
The sensation of water vanished. The darkness fled. Vibrant green light became blinding, filling my vision, my being, until nothing remained but light, until I was nothing but a vessel for that invasive luminosity.
I was no longer holding her hand.
The physical connection severed, and I was cast adrift in an ocean made not of water, but of memory. Of time. Of truths that did not belong to me.
And then, the light receded.
And I was no longer in the temple in Bilgewater.
I was... something else. A bodiless presence. A witness.
Realisation came slowly, like dawn light seeping into a shuttered room. I had no weight. The floor, ceiling, the chamber walls, all had dissolved into a formless grey nothingness, the kind of void existing between thoughts, between worlds, between what was and what will be.
I looked down, expecting to see my hands, my body, the familiar form I have worn for millennia.
What I saw was a faint silhouette. An outline of myself woven from pale light and mist, translucent as smoked glass or the image of a ghost in tales Demacians whisper to frighten their children. I could see through myself to the infinite grey beyond.
I was an echo.
A consciousness without a body, floating in a space between moments. A ghost condemned to observe, but not to intervene. To witness, but not to change.
Then, the deluge came.
There was no warning. No preparation. No kindness of a gradual introduction.
Memories hit me like a wave, no, like a thousand simultaneous waves, each coming from a different direction, each carrying the wreckage of an entire life. They did not come in order. They did not come with context. They came like shards of glass hurled against my consciousness, each fragment cutting as it passed.
(A burning forest. Screams. The smell of cooking flesh that was my own—)
(Gentle hands braiding my hair. A voice singing a lullaby in a tongue I had never heard, but my heart recognised—)
(Chains. Always chains. Cold iron against wrists that had bled for days—)
(The taste of poison sliding down a throat. Betrayal in the eyes of one I loved—)
(A child laughing. My child? The child I was? The distinction dissolved—)
(Blades. So many blades. Entering from so many different angles—)
(Sun rising over a battlefield covered in bodies. I was one of them. I was all of them—)
(Drowning. The panic of lungs seeking air that did not exist—)
(Love. A face I did not recognise, but which made my chest ache with impossible longing—)
(Hunger. The kind of hunger that eats you from the inside until nothing remains but bone and despair—)
(Wings. Did I have wings? Did I lose wings? Did someone tear them off whilst I—)
My mind screamed.
It was not physical pain; I had no body to feel physical pain. It was something worse. It was the sensation of being stretched beyond any conceivable limit, of having my consciousness forced to contain oceans when I was merely a cup. Every memory demanded space. Every life clamoured for attention. Every death insisted on being felt, mourned, processed.
And they kept coming.
(Birth. The shock of first air. Cold. Abandonment—)
(A coronation. Was I King? Queen? The weight of the crown was unbearable—)
(Plague. My body undoing itself whilst I still breathed—)
(A kiss. The first. The last. All the kisses in between—)
(Slavery. The sound of the whip. The humiliation that was worse than the pain—)
(Magic flowing through me like lightning. The power. The cost—)
(A mother holding me. A mother abandoning me. Mothers I never knew—)
(War. Always war. Faces changed, banners changed, but blood always smelled the same—)
The pressure on my consciousness became unbearable.
Had I a skull, it would have cracked. Had I eyes, they would have bled. The pain was a living presence, a creature made of too many memories trying to occupy too small a space. I felt my own identity begin to dissolve at the edges, my notion of who I was drowning in the sea of who she had been.
But who I was became difficult to define when I was also a dragon dying in the mountains, a child sinking in a river, a god being drained on a black stone, a slime being sliced in half, a queen poisoned by her own son, a soldier with a spear through the chest, a witch burning in a square, a beggar freezing in an alley, a—
(Stop.)
The thought was not mine.
It was an external will, ancient, vast. The same presence that had brought us here. Nagakabouros. The Goddess of Motion. Whatever this entity inhabiting the depths truly was.
And with that silent command, the deluge ceased.
The memories did not vanish; I could still feel them, thousands, perhaps millions, waiting in the shadows of my perception like patient wolves circling a campfire. But they were... organised. Contained. Pushed to the fringes of my consciousness, where they still throbbed like a fresh wound, but no longer drowned me.
The relief was so intense it almost hurt as much as the pain.
And I had seen only fragments. Shards. Distorted reflections of an ocean I could barely conceive.
How is she still standing? How does she still laugh? How can she still look at the world and not—
The answer came with the cruel clarity of one who finally understands:
Because she has no choice. Because stopping is not an option when you know you will wake again, in another body, with all these memories still waiting.
The void around me stabilised. The pain in my consciousness receded to a constant throb, present, but bearable. And then, as if the entity controlling this space had decided I was ready, a single memory detached itself from the chaos.
It came slowly this time. With purpose. With the clear intention of being seen, not merely felt.
And I saw her.
A majestic and solitary creature, a dragon whose scales were the white of purest snow, each the size of a war shield. She cut through the sky with a grace that made the heart ache, not with the joy of freedom, but with the weight of centuries. Circling a world changing too fast beneath her wings, a world that no longer recognised her, that no longer wanted her.
I watched her fly.
And then I saw her death.
Not in glorious battle, not in a confrontation worthy of her majesty. But in a trap. Magic circles, chains, and harpoons. Mortals who coveted her heart for the power it contained, who saw in her not a creature of ancient beauty, but a resource to be extracted. Her screams of fury and pain echoed through the mountains until silence fell upon her like a shroud.
The dragon's scream still echoed in my soul when the icy mountain air was replaced by the scent of damp earth and chlorophyll.
I was in a sunlit glade.
The world was seen from below, a tapestry of moss and fallen leaves, light filtered through a green canopy, the kind of perspective belonging to the small, the humble, those the world ignores.
And there they were.
A family. A community of slimes, translucent and pulsing gently with sunlight. I recognised her, not by shape, for they were all nearly identical, but by essence. A serene consciousness at the centre of the group, part of a collective 'us'.
Their existence was a silent meditation.
They felt the sun's warmth, the rain's cool touch, the vibration of the earth beneath their gelatinous forms. Moving as one, thinking as one, existing as one. It was peaceful. It was innocent. It was the kind of simplicity complex mortals spend lifetimes trying to reclaim.
Then, the ground shook with heavy footsteps.
Voices were loud, tearing the sacred quiet of the place. Adventurers. Four of them, dressed in leather and steel, laughing amongst themselves, talking of bounties and glory with the casualness of discussing the weather.
They saw the slimes.
"Ah, look. Just slimes," said one, voice full of boredom. "Easy. Take the cores. Worth a few coins at the alchemy market."
'Just slimes'.
I wanted to scream. Wanted to warn them. Wanted to materialise between the swords and those innocent creatures and ask:
But I was a ghost. A witness without voice, without body, without power.
I watched, helpless, as the swords descended.
The "us" came undone in silent agony. I did not feel physical pain, not in the way flesh does, but I saw. I saw the confusion in their primitive consciousness. The terror. The exact moment she realised she was being forced to witness her family being methodically annihilated.
Not with anger. Not with hatred. With the casual indifference of someone picking herbs by a roadside.
To the adventurers, they were just monsters. Resources. Dots on a hunting map. Their existence, their peace, their family... it didn't matter. It never mattered.
The water carried me into darkness. To a scene colder still. Even more terribly human.
I was floating in a small, wretched room. The smell was of poverty and fear, that specific odour permeating places where hope died long ago. A young woman, barely more than a girl, stood beside a makeshift bed.
Her face was empty.
Eyes lifeless. As if something essential had been removed from her before this very moment.
On the bed, a small bundle shifted. A thin cry cut the silence, a fragile thread of life, insistent, not yet aware that the world did not want it.
It was a baby. Newborn.
With a tuft of hair so white it looked like silver.
Azra'il.
Recognition was a punch to the gut I did not possess. My daughter. My child. There, in that squalid room, in the hands of one who should protect her.
The young mother looked at the infant with terrible apathy, the sort of emptiness existing when the soul has already given up the fight. With slow, mechanical movements, she picked up a rough hessian sack.
And then, with hands that should have cradled, she placed the newborn baby inside the sack.
A soundless scream tore my ghostly soul. I tried to move. Tried to intervene. Tried to scream for her to stop, to look at that child, to see what she was throwing away.
But my translucent hands passed through her. Through the sack. Through everything.
I was an echo. An echo can hold nothing.
I followed her as she walked out into the cold night, to the edge of a dark, muddy river. She did not hesitate. Did not weep. With a single movement, the kind of gesture made when discarding something worthless, she tossed the sack into the water.
I watched, frozen in horror, as the small bundle struggled on the surface for a moment. The muffled cry becoming a bubbling sound. Life fighting death with the stubbornness of those who have not yet learned that sometimes, struggle is futile.
And then, she sank.
Vanishing into darkness.
The silence that followed was the most violent thing I had witnessed in aeons of existence. A life barely begun, snuffed out with the same casualness as one discards rubbish.
The river's darkness should have been the end. The deepest point of pain. But the water, the mirror of Azra'il's soul, had not finished with me.
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💬 Author's Note
____________
You all keep asking about Azra'il's past.
"Author, show us her past lives."
"Author, how many times has she died?"
"Author, what happened before all this?"
Well then.
Here in Runeterra, you finally got a glimpse.
Just a glimpse.
A fragment. A shard. A distorted reflection in the depths of the water.
And even so, it hurt, didn't it?
Yes, we will have more chapters showing parts of her past. Some specific moments. Some important lives. Some choices that shaped who she is today.
But no, I'm not going to show everything.
Firstly, because it would be a thousand chapters of just accumulated trauma.
Secondly, because the charm of Azra'il has always been the mystery.
She is not an open book.
She is a submerged library.
And not even Morgana managed to see everything (she would go mad if she saw all the lives), but she saw enough to understand, to comprehend Azra'il's soul.
Now I want to know from you:
What did you think of the chapter?
What did you think of the little you saw of her lives?
Which memory got to you the most?
And… do you really want to see more?
Be careful what you wish for. 😌