The things around her were so far beyond anything she understood that Kai'Sa had to throw out everything she thought she knew. The underground world was not dark after all.
But the light here felt wrong.
She could not have explained why, only that the sight of it filled her with a dread that circled her heart like a vulture.
A ghostly violet glow seeped from the tunnel walls. The glowing hollows were arranged in vertical rows, running parallel to the ground, like the steady light of a purple heart shining through a cage of ribs. The glow was dim and blurred, as if hidden behind some thin layer of flesh, making it impossible to see what lay beneath.
A tunnel lined with ribs.
That was the first thought that came to the young girl.
But what kind of creature could have ribs this long? The place felt less like a tunnel and more like the inside of some enormous cocoon.
Kai'Sa followed the light downward, eating as she walked—small scraps of food, a few waterskins, and rotten peaches she had found in the ruins.
Right now, it was exactly what she needed. After enduring hunger for three days, anything that could fill her stomach felt precious.
Zihark still trailed her like a ghost, but unlike Kai'Sa, he was not traveling light, and the gap between them slowly widened.
He was carrying several kilos of food and water on his back, gripping a spear that was a little too heavy for a ten-year-old, dragging along an injured body, and keeping as quiet as possible so Kai'Sa would not notice him. Just keeping up with her was already pushing him to his limit.
Still, he did not dare call out and ask her to stop. He was terrified she might miss the encounter waiting ahead and send fate toward a future where neither of them survived.
In the darkness, he prayed to Nasus and begged for both of them to see the sun of Shurima again.
He knew it was pointless. Nasus had long since lost himself in the endless sands. There was no way a god like that would hear the prayers of a child.
Thinking of the danger waiting ahead, Zihark felt he would be better off hoping for a sudden chime in his head and some kind of system awakening instead.
He quickly threw that foolish thought away. If he did not hurry, he was going to lose her.
The butt of his spear struck the hard ground without leaving the slightest mark.
Zihark noticed that the stone beneath his feet was unnaturally smooth, not because lava had once flowed across it, but because something had worn it down through constant passage.
He knew what that meant.
Void creatures. The things waiting for him at the end of this tunnel.
...
At the end of the tunnel, the path opened into a vast cavern.
The light was stronger here. That eerie violet glow flickered and spread across the entire cave.
The tunnel beneath his feet twisted and curled through the space, branching off again and again.
Upward, downward, and out in every direction.
Above Kai'Sa's head, a spiraling passage climbed into the darkness. Following the steep, narrow track that jutted out like a spine, she might even be able to crawl back out.
That was what she was thinking when a sudden disturbance rose from somewhere below her.
"What is that...?"
She clapped a hand over her mouth on instinct and looked down the sharply sloping drop.
At the bottom, deep in the abyss, something moved.
No natural creature could have given birth to something so grotesque, so completely wrong. One look was enough to turn her stomach and freeze her blood.
Clusters of warm violet pinpoints stared straight at her, more numerous than the stars in the sky.
They looked like creatures from another world. Hooked limbs clung to the edge of the abyss and dragged up one twisted body after another.
Their forms were primitive and horrific, covered in rough purple-black plates with bony spikes jutting out in places. Their flesh was the pale, sickly color of something dead.
Inside hard jaws sat rows of crooked fangs packed together like the teeth of a comb. Their mouths split open all the way to the throat, strings of foul slime hanging in full view.
Set beneath those huge, diamond-shaped heads was a chest and abdomen fused into a single mass, with a raised back behind it. Buried there was something that, in biological terms, might have been called a heart.
But it was not a true heart.
It was a cluster of ancient violet energy, casting its eerie, venomous glow through the membrane between gaps in the chitin and lighting the cave walls.
"Monsters!"
In an instant, Kai'Sa remembered the frightening stories her father used to tell her.
The underground world was full of monsters, hiding in the dark, dragging travelers down into the depths. And no one who went there ever came back the same.
She had always thought they were just stories. But now that the creatures were right in front of her, alive and real, hunger gave way to fear all over again.
The evil Void creatures had already noticed her. Driven by endless hunger and a murderous urge that could never be soothed, they swarmed up the slope and closed in on the girl from every side.
Kai'Sa gripped her dagger with both hands and did everything she could to protect herself.
One creature about her size lunged first. Young as she was, Kai'Sa recoiled from its ugliness with every fiber of her being, and in that instant her whole body moved with a kind of perfect coordination she had never known before. She drove the dagger forward with all her strength.
The creature slammed her to the ground. A bladed forelimb sliced open the tender flesh of her arm with ease, and the blood that sprayed out splattered across the monsters around her, only to be greedily absorbed by their chitinous shells.
At the same time, the dagger in her hand struck true, plunging straight into the pulsing, faintly glowing heart inside the monster's chest.
The impact of the creature's leap sent her skidding down the slope, and the two of them tumbled together into the deeper dark below.
By the time Zihark reached the cavern entrance, all he saw was the instant Kai'Sa rolled over the edge. His eyes flew wide, as though an invisible rope had suddenly appeared in that moment, one end tied around her waist and the other around his.
Then the rope called fate snapped tight and yanked him forward.
He burst into motion with a speed he had never shown before, charging out of the tunnel. Before the scything blade-legs snapping out from both sides could hack into his knees, he forced his way through the thick swarm and sprinted down into the abyss.
But he had no idea how steep the slope really was. After a brief moment of weightlessness, he crashed hard onto the stone below and rolled down into the depths in a graceless heap.
...
Zihark woke because fresh pain jolted him back to consciousness. When he tried to brace himself and sit up, he realized his left arm no longer gave him any sensation beyond pain.
At least his ribs had not broken again. But the pressure of the fall had crushed his half-healed lungs, and now he was coughing up blood.
None of that mattered most.
Kai'Sa did.
The unconscious girl lay in the corner of his vision, and beside her was the monster whose heart she had pierced.
The thing in its chest had gone dark. It no longer pulsed with that steady violet glow, like breath moving in and out.
From what Zihark knew about Void creatures, it was dead.
He dragged himself over on his knees, and what he saw next made his breathing turn ragged. He almost coughed up blood again.
A strange new layer covered Kai'Sa's wounded arm.
What had once been part of the creature's chest armor was now fused tightly to her skin.
"After three days... the first step finally worked."
Zihark had spent the entire time hiding in the background, but at that moment he felt more involved than anyone in the world, as if he were the one completing the symbiosis.
He was so overwhelmed he started crying. If his body had allowed it, he would have rolled on the ground in celebration for this hard-won first victory.
[End of chapter]