POV - Azra'il
Lying at the bottom of the crater with her armour in shards and golden blood forming puddles around her body, she heard it. Her sister's voice cutting through the battlefield as it cut through everything else: without asking permission, without hesitation, without leaving an option to ignore.
"The swords. Now."
I saw Kayle's eyes move. From her sister, standing and bleeding, holding a Darkin on his knees with chains erupting from her own body, to Morgana's sword driven into the ground beside her. And then to her own blade, embedded five metres away.
I saw the calculation happen. The moment her brain processed what Morgana was demanding.
"Both swords. Both halves. Together."
Kayle rolled to her side. Her body protested, every muscle, every bone, every centimetre of skin complaining with a "no", a "enough", a "stop". She did not stop. She crawled towards Morgana's sword. Her fingers closed around the hilt of the dark blade.
She was holding Morgana's sword. The dark blade. The half she would later despise; the half representing everything she would consider wrong in her sister: the shadow, the compassion she called weakness, the magic that smelled of the earth rather than the heavens.
(And she was holding onto it as if it were a lifeline.)
She dragged herself towards her own. Five metres of shattered ground, each centimetre costing a price I did not care to reckon. Her free hand reached out. Fingers touched the hilt of the sword of light.
And she held both.
What occurred was not a rebirth. It was not ascension. It was nothing like what the bards would sing of later, because bards lie, and they lie beautifully, turning muddled moments into clean epics that never were.
What happened was simpler and more brutal.
The two blades awoke.
Kayle's half, the light one, pulsed with a brilliance I already recognised. But Morgana's half, the dark one, responded for the first time, as if recognising its sister in the hand that held it. They vibrated together, and where Kayle's hands gripped both at once, the energies met.
Not in harmony. Not in beauty. Violently. Light and shadow collided within the metal like two currents in a river, fighting, pushing, merging at the collision points until what emerged was neither light nor shadow, but something between the two that glowed with an intensity that made the eyes ache.
The air around Kayle heated. The floor of the crater smouldered. Not spontaneous combustion, nor the birth of a new sun, but heat. Real, dense, suffocating heat. The sort of heat that pours from a furnace when the door is flung open.
Kayle's wings unfurled.
And they caught fire.
The white and gold feathers, every single one of them, ignited like oil-soaked wicks. Live flames, crackling, racing along the span of her wings until each feather was an individual torch and the two wings together were a wall of celestial fire roaring in the wind.
(It isn't a goddess being born. It's more of a girl holding two swords that are far too large for her and refusing to let go.)
[The combined power of the two blades is overloading her body. She is not controlling it; she is containing it. The difference is critical.]
[Exactly.]
Kayle rose. The wings of fire yanked her from the ground, not with the smoothness of an ascendant entity, but with the raw force of one rising through sheer stubbornness whilst the power carried her more than she carried the power. She hovered above the crater, the two swords crossed before her chest. Her silver hair billowed in the heat emanating from her own frame.
The light was intense. Strong enough to cast long shadows from the stones and debris. Strong enough for the folk on the wall to raise their hands to shield their eyes.
Aatrox looked up.
Morgana's chains still held him, the dark fire biting into his flesh, draining him, sealing him. On one knee, arms partially spread, the Darkin sword dangling in his hand without the strength to raise it. The flesh putrefied at the contact points with the chains, layer upon layer of void.
And he saw Kayle.
I expected fear. Rage. Despair.
What I saw was something else.
His ember-eyes widened more than I had ever seen. His mouth curled. Not in mockery. Something that, on a less monstrous face, I would have called relief.
"Ah." The voice was low. Almost quiet. The contrast with his earlier roars was more disturbing than any scream. "You are not like the mother yet. Not a complete Aspect. You are still but a daughter clutching what your mother left behind."
The ember-eyes studied the flaming girl above him.
"But it is enough." And now, indeed, the smile. Not of mockery. The weary smile of one seeking the end for millennia. "It is enough. Come, daughter of Mihira. Finish the song your mother left unsung."
(He wants to die, Eos.)
[He wants to stop. They are different things. But the practical result is the same.]
(I shouldn't feel pity for a creature that dismantled entire hamlets for sport.)
[And yet you do.]
[The difference is you have a choice. He no longer does.]
Down below, Morgana held on.
The chains trembled in her hands. The effort corroded every fibre. Her arms burned. Her will wavered centimetre by centimetre. Golden blood trickled from her nose, her body paying a price no body should ever pay. She was too young for this. Both were too young for all of this.
She looked up. At Kayle. At this stubborn girl with flaming wings and two swords that were too big for her, glowing with the fury of a heritage she never asked to carry.
"Now, Kay," she whispered. To herself. To no one. "Now."
And she pulled.
The chains contracted with everything Morgana had. Everything she was. The dark fire roared, and Aatrox was wrenched downwards and outwards. His arms were forced open. His torso exposed. His chest laid bare.
And at the centre: a point. Pulsing. A red deeper than the rest. The Darkin heart. Not an organ. An anchor. The point where blade, flesh, and soul merged.
"KAYLE! THE CHEST! THE HEART!"
Aatrox looked up at the girl descending towards him.
And he laughed.
Not a laugh of mockery. A relieved laugh. The sound of one who has carried a weight for so long they have forgotten what it was like to be unburdened, and finally sees the promise that it will stop.
"Finally." Almost a whisper. "Finally, finally."
Kayle descended.
The wings of fire tucked against her body, not with the elegance of a trained warrior, but with the raw instinct of one discovering what to do the very instant they do it. The two swords crossed before her. The one of light and the one of shadow. The heritage the mother had split was, for an instant, reunited.
She was not a goddess or an Ascendant. Kayle was a woman, furious, terrified, and determined, falling from the sky with more power than she knew how to handle and the unshakeable intent to drive that power into the chest of something that wanted to die.
The crossed swords struck Aatrox's chest.
At the exact point. The heart.
The impact was not an elegant explosion. It was a detonation. Light, shadow, fire, and something between the two, bursting from the contact point like a dam breaching. The shockwave expanded in circles, and wherever it passed, Aatrox's red light was extinguished. The corruption on the ground receded. The air cleared. The misplaced flames in the debris died out.
Morgana's chains shattered. Every link disintegrated into shadow-dust that dissipated like ash, taking with it the effort, the pain, and the last drop of will Morgana possessed. She fell to her knees. Then to her side. Hands in the dirt. Breathing like one who had just surfaced from underwater.
And Aatrox—
Aatrox came undone.
He did not die. The thing inside the sword could not die. What happened was the body, that monstrous construct of stolen flesh and millennia of hunger, decomposed. The layers unravelling from the inside out. Flesh turning to ash. Armour turning to dust. Horns splintering. Wings disintegrating.
And for an instant, a single instant lasting less than a blink, I saw it.
Beneath it all. Beneath the flesh and the metal and the millennia of hatred.
A face.
Human. Or what had been human, once. Before the Sun. Before the Ascension. Before the betrayal, the imprisonment, and the blade. The face of a man. Weary. With eyes that, for a fraction of a second, held no embers.
They held tears.
(Ah.)
(So that was what you were. Before everything.)
(Just another man who accepted too much power and was destroyed by it.)
(...How familiar.)
Then he vanished. And what remained fell.
The Darkin sword. Inert. Silent. Lustreless. Merely heavy, dark metal, hitting the ground with a dry, definitive thud.
A gargantuan sword with something trapped inside that had, at last, stopped screaming, at least for a time.
The silence afterwards was the kind that weighs heavy.
I have been in many silences. Far too many. That of abandoned libraries. That of battlefields after the last soldier has fallen. The one that exists between two people who love each other and don't know how to say it.
That one was all of them at once.
The flames on Kayle's wings died. They didn't diminish; they died. Like a fire consuming its last scrap of wood and snuffing out all at once. The feathers returned, white, golden, normal. She landed. Standing. Firm. But I saw the cost, the tremor in her legs that she hid by locking her knees, the breath she controlled by gritting her teeth, the sweat on her face she did not wipe because wiping would be to admit the effort.
The two swords in her hands. Light in her right. Shadow in her left.
On the wall, the silence broke. It began as a murmur and grew into a roar. Applause. Shouts. Weeping. The emotional explosion of hundreds who had held their breath.
"Protector! Redeemer!"
"They won!"
And I watched the thing happen.
The thing I had feared since the moment Kayle gripped both swords. Not the power. Not the fire. The thing that comes after the power, when the fire snuffs out and all that remains is the memory of having been great. The memory of having held her mother's heritage and, for an instant, having been worthy.
I have seen this drug before. In other lives. In other people. Power's addiction is not the power itself; it's the certainty it grants. The certainty of being right. Of being enough. Of needing nothing else, not towers, not sandwiches, not interlaced hands in the dark.
The Kayle receiving that worship was not the Kayle from the tower. I saw the transition happen in real-time. Her face closing. Her shoulders squaring. Her posture becoming that of the Protector: rigid, inaccessible, perfect. Mihira's power still pulsed in her hands, and with it came the distance. The brilliance that separated. The light that, the stronger it grew, the more it isolated.
(She is at heart just a girl, Eos. A girl who from an early age had to carry more than she should and now thinks that weight is purpose.)
[This is how it begins. Always.]
Morgana stood up. Slowly. Her arms trembling. Veins pulsing with residual purple. Dried golden blood on her face, her arms, and what was left of her armour. Her wounded wing drooping.
But on her feet. Always on her feet.
She looked at Kayle. Searching. Trying to find, in the sister holding both their mother's swords with the face of one who had found the answer to everything, some trace of the sister who had leaned her head on her shoulder and said, "Shut up and eat the sandwich."
Kayle turned.
And Morgana did not find her.
Kayle's eyes were cold. The cold of someone who has touched something that confirmed everything she believed about herself and erased everything she was beginning to doubt.
Kayle looked at the dark sword in her left hand. Morgana's. And I saw her fingers tighten, not with affection. With accusation.
"You treated it like rubbish." Her voice still carried residues of the power, deeper, more resonant than it ought to be. Without looking at Morgana. "The blade that gave us purpose, driven into the mud so that you could use... this. This magic that reeks of desperation."
The ground could have swallowed Morgana whole and hurt her less.
I saw the impact hit Morgana like a physical blow. Her body, which had endured chains, had held a Darkin on its knees, had flown even when mangled, shuddered.
"Purpose, Kay?" Her voice was choked. "That blade was a weight in my hand whilst you were being crushed. I did not toss it out of disrespect; I let go of it so I could reach out my arms and catch you."
Kayle turned fully towards her.
And what I saw on her face made me wish I could intervene. To slap that face and shake it until the vulnerable sister from the tower reappeared.
Because there was nothing there. Nothing human. Nothing of the sandwich-eating sister. Merely appraisal. The look of one analysing evidence in a courtroom, not of one looking at the person who saved her life.
"Mother gave us these swords so that we might be more than we are. That we might overcome the weakness of the flesh." Every syllable cold. "By rejecting it, you proved you prefer the world's filth to the heaven's splendour. You dishonour our lineage, Morgana."
Morgana recoiled a step. As if struck.
"Heaven's splendour." She repeated it. "Last night, Kay. You ate Papa's sandwich. You rested your head on my shoulder. You said you were afraid that rage would consume you." Eyes welling up. Voice steady. "Where is that Kayle?"
Kayle gripped the hilts of the swords.
And I saw the light on the blades flicker. For half a second. The light trembled like a flame in a gale, and I knew that beneath the ice, beneath the power, the Kayle from the tower was still there. Listening. Longing. Dying to let go of it all and hold her sister.
And then I saw the instant she chose to do none of that.
In my long lives, I have seen folk choose horrific things. I have seen kings choose war. I have seen parents choose abandonment. I have seen lovers choose pride.
But seeing Kayle choose her mother's armour over her sister's arms, after having held her hand in the dark, was a type of cruelty so specific, so personal, that it made me feel something I thought I no longer felt.
Rage.
(Don't do it, Kayle. Don't destroy the only good thing that happened in both your lives because of the shimmer of a sword and the ghost of a mother who isn't even here—)
[Azra'il.]
<—to see the wreckage this heritage causes in every person that touches it—>
[Azra'il. Breathe.]
(I don't breathe, Eos. I haven't lungs in this form. I have nothing, and yet it still bloody well hurts to see Morgana go through this.)
"That Kayle was being weak." The voice iced over. "Justice has no shoulder to lean on, Morgana. And evidently, it has no room for sisters who prefer the shadows to the light of duty."
Morgana looked at Kayle.
I saw the war on her face. The Morgana who wanted to scream, to grab her, to shake her, to say 'I saw who you really are, I felt your hands in mine in the dark and I know it was real.' The one who wanted to beg.
And the one who chose to do none of that. Because begging only pushed Kayle further away. Because the more Morgana advanced, the more Kayle retreated. The same old dynamic. The one that made me want to tear my hair out.
"I see." Her voice was a broken thing trying to seem whole. "A bit of her shimmer was all it took for you to forget the warmth of our blood."
Kayle did not move.
"You are no longer fighting for the city, Kay." A step back. Then another. "You are fighting so she will be proud of you. A mother who isn't even here to see what you are becoming in her name."
Morgana walked up to Kayle.
She extended her hand.
"Give me my sword back."
Kayle looked at the outstretched hand. At her sister's face. And what was on Morgana's face at that moment was fear. The fear of one who had seen her sister grip both blades and transform into something other. Something more distant. Colder. More akin to the golden statue the city worshipped and less like the sister who leaned on her.
I don't think Morgana wanted the sword back out of attachment or power. She wanted it because as long as Kayle continued to hold both halves, the bridge between them would close even further. Every second that Mihira's full power ran through her sister's veins was an additional second of distance. An additional second of ice. An additional second of Kayle convincing herself she needed nothing but the light.
And Morgana had already lost part of her sister the instant the power surged and Kayle's eyes became a courtroom. She didn't want to lose even more. Not for a sword.
"Give it back, Kay."
Kayle looked at the outstretched hand.
And she did not let go.
I saw her fingers tighten around the dark hilt. I saw her knuckles turn white. And I understood, with the horrific clarity of one who has seen too many folk become addicted to things that destroy, exactly what was happening.
Kayle hesitated to return the sword. Because when she had held both blades together, the world made sense. For the first time. The power fitted. The doubt stopped. The voice inside her saying "you are not enough" finally fell silent. And now Morgana's hand was outstretched asking her to return the only thing that had made the noise stop.
It was like asking someone to return the silence.
"Kay." Morgana's voice was not an accusation. It was a plea disguised as firmness. "The sword."
Kayle's fingers tightened even further. And I saw the struggle, between the sister who wanted Morgana's shoulder on the tower and the warrior who had tasted full power and couldn't forget the flavour. Both pulling in opposite directions within the same body.
For three seconds, I did not know which would win.
The fingers finally opened.
The dark sword fell into Morgana's hand. Her fingers closed around the hilt with the urgency of one recovering something they nearly lost, the necessary distance between Kayle and the complete power. The wall between her sister and the abyss.
I saw Morgana's shoulders tremble as the sword returned to her hand. A minimal, contained tremor. Relief and sadness so mingled that one couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
Because recovering the sword meant that the "whole" had ended. That the two halves were going to separate again. That the thing that made Kayle shine with their mother's power was also the thing stealing her sister from her.
And Morgana had chosen the sister.
Even if the sister had not chosen her back.
"Keep yours, Kay." Without looking back. Voice low. "If it makes you feel so powerful, enjoy it." She then turned away. "But don't come looking for my shoulder afterwards. Your mother's brilliance should be enough to keep you warm."
And she walked towards the city. Dark sword in hand. Her wounded wing dragging on the ground.
Kayle remained.
Standing with her sword of light. The one that, whilst it shone, also isolated her. And her left hand empty. The hand that three seconds ago held total power and now held nothing.
The hand that had held Morgana's hand in the dark.
Empty.
And I saw something in Kayle's face that made me understand everything. It was the expression of one who has just tasted the purest drug in the world, had the vial snatched from her hands, and knows with the certainty that destroys, that she will spend the rest of her life trying to feel that again.
(She will, Eos. She'll spend years seeking that power. She'll distance herself further and further. She'll climb higher and shine brighter and grow colder and lonelier until one day the distance between her and Morgana is so great that no family bond will manage to cross it.)
I watched Kayle's eyes follow her sister disappearing into the streets.
I saw her jaw tremble.
I saw her empty hand close. Gripping the air. Gripping the memory of the weight that was no longer there.
And I saw Kayle turn her face away. Swallowing it down. Rebuilding the wall from the inside out, brick by brick, until her face was a mask and the sister from the tower was locked away where even she herself would not find her. A statue of gold and regret that did not yet know it was regret. The folk shouted her name. The city celebrated. And she was more alone than any person surrounded by hundreds of voices has a right to be.
(Tragic. Poetic. Unfortunately... predictable.)
Then the 'sea' arrived. The tug. That sensation coming from the depths, Nagakabouros's invisible tentacle closing around my consciousness like an underwater current deciding I had swam far enough in that direction.
The darkness rose. Dense. Profound. The black of oceanic trenches where light never arrived and never will.
(Do you know what I hate about primordial sea goddesses? It's not the power. It's not the arrogance. It's that they never give you a heads-up. They just yank. Like the tide. As if my consciousness were a splinter of wood in an ocean and the splinter's opinion on direction were irrelevant.)
Morgana's memories dissolved around me like ink swallowed by the ocean. With a final, anything-but-subtle yank from the primordial Serpent, the darkness swallowed my consciousness for good.
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💬 Author's Notes
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Okay… let's talk. 😐
This chapter isn't just about defeating Aatrox.
It's about what happens after you win.
Because, technically… they won, right?
The monster fell, the people celebrated, everything very epic, very beautiful, very "cinematic".
But I didn't want to write a clean victory.
I wanted to write the kind of victory that comes at a price.
And here, the price wasn't physical. It was emotional. It was silent. It was the kind of damage that nobody sees at the time… but that defines everything that comes after.
Kayle, for a few seconds, had everything.
The two swords. The complete power. The absolute certainty.
And that's where the problem lies.
Because power isn't addictive because of what it does… it's addictive because of what it makes you feel.
For the first time, the noise inside her head stopped. The doubt disappeared. The fear disappeared. The feeling of "not being enough" disappeared.
And when that happens… going back hurts.
It hurts a lot.
And yes, I'll take this opportunity to comment on something important: this entire Aatrox arc was heavily inspired by the Still Here music video.
I took that vibe, that brutality, that almost tragic feeling of inevitable confrontation, and expanded it with my own interpretation within the story.
Now about Morgana…
…man.
She realized.
She saw exactly what was happening to Kayle at that moment.
It wasn't just power.
It was distance.
It was that coldness starting to settle in.
And then comes her choice. She asked for the sword back.
Because she understood that, as long as Kayle had both… she would continue to distance herself.
Every second with that full power was another step away.
And Morgana chose to cut that off right there.
Even knowing it meant breaking that "perfect moment."
Even knowing it would hurt.
Even knowing it might be too late.
And that, for me, is the true heart of this chapter.
It's not the final blow.
It's the outstretched hand… and the decision to stop someone from getting lost, even if that person doesn't realize they're getting lost.
Now I want to know from you:
👉 What did you think of Kayle here?
Do you understand her… or are you already wanting to jump into the story and slap her?
👉 And Morgana… did her choice hurt you too, or did I exaggerate?
👉 And VERY important:
Did you notice the exact moment Kayle changes?
Because it happens in real time.
And about Aatrox…
I didn't want to make him just "the final villain screaming."
There's a moment there where he… isn't fighting to win.
He's fighting to end it.
And that changes everything.
Anyway.
Congratulations, you survived another chapter.
But relax… it only gets worse from here on out. 😌