"Here?"
Kai'Sa glanced back at the swarm. Only after confirming they were not reacting did she turn around, crouch beside the dead Voidling, and force herself to cut it open with her broken-handled dagger.
She had never done anything like this before. The closest experience she had was watching her mother slaughter chickens a few times.
Because of Zihark's earlier failure, she was even more careful this time, doing everything she could to keep the Voidling's fluids and flesh from splashing onto her skin.
That stuff was too terrifying. It felt like the opposite of matter itself. The moment it touched living flesh, both seemed to eat each other away.
After some effort, she finally carved the heart free from the cartilage protecting it and set it in the creature's belly plate.
It looked like a broken yolk cradled in half an eggshell. Thick purple energy oozed out of it in slow drops, falling one by one to the ground. Its mere presence distorted the air, and black smoke rose from the rock wherever matter dissolved away.
Seeing that, Kai'Sa could not help wondering whether something like this could really save a life. If it was so dangerous, why had it not killed her back then?
"Give it to me. Hurry."
Kai'Sa heard Zihark urge her from behind and turned too quickly in her panic. She had not expected the limp heart, made of pure Void energy, to be so slick and weightless. The motion flung it from her hand, and it slapped right against the armor fused to her arm.
The plate immediately began greedily absorbing the energy. Violet threads lit up inside the gouge on its surface, and pale, writhing matter stitched the crack closed like a weaver mending a torn blanket.
Before she could react, more than half the heart was already gone.
Kai'Sa panicked and tried to shake it off, hoping to save at least some for Zihark, but in the end the uncontrollable plate devoured all of it.
"Sorry... I... I didn't mean to..."
Kai'Sa looked ready to cry. When she lifted her head to look at Zihark, she saw that his face had turned deathly pale, standing out starkly against the black veins spreading under his skin.
Then he dropped to his knees.
The light in his eyes had dimmed so much that, in the dark, it was almost impossible to make it out.
It was the look of hope collapsing.
Kai'Sa's heart lurched. She knew she had ruined everything, and something terrible was about to happen.
"I'll go get another one. Please, just... please don't... don't..."
Supporting Zihark with trembling hands, she was swallowed by panic. She tried desperately to make up for what she had done, her voice small and pleading, as if begging gods not to take away the last thing she had left.
"Don't do anything stupid. You can't fight that many Voidlings alone. Get me out of here first."
With the last of his strength, Zihark hooked an arm around Kai'Sa's neck and kept her from leaving him behind.
He spoke like he was giving orders, as if he still had strength left. Kai'Sa's shoulders shook once, and she helped him deeper into the tunnel, miserable and silent.
Only after they reached a safer place did she carefully lower him to the ground.
But the moment she let go, he collapsed completely, limp and drained, with only a pair of half-lidded eyes still fixed weakly on her.
His body had been eaten away by the Void. His life was already at its end. Once again, the world was being taken from her.
The moment she saw him like that, everything in front of Kai'Sa seemed to go black.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry... I was wrong... please... please... don't... don't leave me!"
Despair closed around her again. Her broken pleas echoed through the tunnel and vanished into the endless dark. The ancient violet glow did not waver in the slightest. It was colder than death itself.
Kai'Sa lowered her head and felt the faint brush of breath against her face. Zihark's lips were moving slightly, as though he still had something to say.
She wiped away her tears and carefully pressed her ear close to him, straining to catch the whisper of air.
"Live on, Kai'Sa..."
That was all he said.
Just one last plea, and buried inside it was endless regret that he could not keep living beside her.
When even his voice faded and only the faintest thread of breath remained, Kai'Sa could no longer hold back her grief. Her nose twitched, and tears spilled down again.
"I'm sorry... I'm sorry..."
Like she had gone mad, she kept apologizing while stabbing at the armor on her own arm with the dagger.
In her mind, this was what Zihark had wanted. And after everything that had happened, she wanted nothing more than to cut it off herself and force it onto him.
Maybe that would save his life.
Even if it killed her.
The dagger left deep scratches in the armor, and Kai'Sa thought she saw hope. Clenching her teeth, she drove the blade down with all her strength again and again.
Her determination to save Zihark pushed her past the body's instinct to protect itself. The dagger finally split the armor open. Luminous purple blood splashed across Zihark's face, and Kai'Sa felt pain so sharp it carved itself into her bones.
Beneath that jagged wound, she saw her own skin.
It had lost all living color, pale and lifeless, like the skin of some blind burrowing creature hiding under desert stone.
And the split in the armor looked like a purple bruise opening into an abyss, glowing with the light of nothingness, as though it led to another world.
The sight of it made her hate herself even more, but this was not the time for that.
Kai'Sa lowered her arm and poured the strange blood flowing from the cut in her armor over Zihark's blackened, shriveled left arm.
Even after all that, he showed no sign of improving. Kai'Sa decided it still was not enough, so she grabbed the spear and ran toward the place where the swarm had gathered before.
"You have to wait for me! I'll bring you back another heart!"
Her footsteps faded into the distance, and once more Zihark was left alone in the dark.
The purple blood on his cheek slipped into the corner of his eye and seeped through the tiny vessels of the retina.
The eyes were the closest part of the body to the brain. As the Void energy spread along those vessels and reached his mind, something strange and unknowable flooded his thoughts in an instant.
Hunger.
Devour.
A terrible sense of emptiness filled his head, and in that eerie violet light, Zihark caught a glimpse of an endless unreality.
Dissolve.
Erase.
As his mind and memories began to turn into something like the Void itself, he found he could no longer immediately remember his original name.
And it was not just that. Pain, touch, sound, light... all of it vanished.
Everything that disappeared seemed to have gone beyond the edge of reality, beneath existence itself, to a place where even the concept of time did not exist.
The true Void.
He began to forget that he existed. He was being erased from existence. Some part of him understood what was happening, but he no longer knew why or how.
Something horrible writhed inside him, chewing through his brain. His mind began to crack and come apart. Everything inside him was being dismantled and sent away to that place of nothing but darkness and cold.
That thing roamed greedily through his memories, devouring whatever it found, and finally pushed into the one place it should never have touched—
the memories of another world.
In that instant, his blackened, deadened arm suddenly clenched into a fist...
[End of chapter]