"Now you've turned into the same kind of thing as me." Kai'Sa came over and compared their skin, finally letting go of the worry she had been holding onto.
Now she knew Zihark could keep living alongside her. That mattered more than anything else.
"Yeah. From now on, we can dig hearts out with our bare hands."
The grayish-white armor tinged with violet clung tightly to his palm. The tips of his fingers had sharpened into something like eagle talons, and that constant prickling sensation still had not gone away.
Zihark flexed his clawed hand and decided the rough layer covering it worked a lot like a medical glove. Its resistance to corrosion meant he could shove his hand straight into a Voidling's chest without injuring himself.
He drove his fingers into the rocky ground. It felt no harder than stabbing into compacted sand. They sank in almost without resistance. Then he dragged them back and left several deep grooves across the stone.
The power was even greater than he had expected.
After that, he turned to look at Kai'Sa and wondered whether he should test whose armor was harder.
Of course, that thought went nowhere. Her armor was already damaged, and he was not about to experiment on her like that.
When Kai'Sa noticed him looking at her, she stared back blankly, then her gaze drifted to his strange eye.
Now Zihark truly had mismatched eyes.
His right eye was still the same dark brown as before, but the left was no longer clearly white and black. It had become a violet abyss with no visible boundary.
Energy rose and fell inside it like a tide, and now and then hideous shapes surfaced within.
Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, neither of them knew.
"Your eye..." Kai'Sa did not seem afraid. She reached out to touch the corner of it, and as Zihark's gaze brushed over the armor on her arm, the ancient prickling pain suddenly went quiet.
It stopped hurting.
Kai'Sa grabbed at her living armor in disbelief, unable to believe it.
By the time she looked back, Zihark had already placed a hand on her face.
"Mmph, what are you doing?" With one cheek pressed in, Kai'Sa's voice came out muffled.
Then she saw him use his fingers to hold one of her eyelids open. His right eye moved closer and closer until their noses were almost touching.
"Your pupil's starting to turn purple too," he said calmly.
"Is it as ugly as yours?" Kai'Sa was breathing the same air he was, and it felt strange. She was starting to get a little light-headed.
"No. It's only the pupil, not the whole eye." He wiped the dust off her face again, and in the dim natural glow around them, he could just make out something else beneath her skin, on the verge of showing itself.
"And you're about to grow face markings too."
He let go of her face. The Void's obsession with threes was starting to show itself on Kai'Sa.
Just like the Voidlings had three eyes and three bony protrusions on each limb, Kai'Sa's cheeks and forehead were beginning to develop three parallel violet markings. They were the Void's imprint on her.
Zihark knew the same change would happen to him eventually, but he had not asked Kai'Sa to look. Even if the signs were already there, they were probably still too faint to notice. She was too young and too careless to spot them anyway. Once they became obvious, there would be plenty of time.
The truth was that no matter what kind of relationship you had with the Void, corruption was inevitable. The only difference was how much of yourself you managed to keep.
Compared to everything else, the kind of symbiosis Zihark and Kai'Sa had stumbled into was already the best possible outcome. The person who had destroyed their homes and dragged them into this underground nightmare had been nothing more than a human already brainwashed and controlled by the Void.
And the Darkin, those Ascended consumed by the Void, had met a fate far worse than theirs.
"Wrinkles? No way, don't scare me. I don't want to turn into an old lady!" At the word "wrinkles," Kai'Sa immediately started squeezing her own face, horrified. She was only ten. How could she already be aging?
"Markings. Face markings." Zihark corrected her irritably, wondering whether the Void had started giving him visions while making her hear things wrong.
"What's a face marking?" Kai'Sa held her cheeks and looked thoroughly confused.
So she had not misheard him after all. She just did not know what a face marking was, so her mind had jumped straight to wrinkles.
"Like a cat's whiskers." He gave her tender little cheek a hard pinch, then stretched the corners of her mouth wide apart. Only then did he feel a little better.
"So... is it ugly?" Without a mirror, Kai'Sa could not see her own face, so all she could do was ask him.
"Not at all. You're the prettiest." Holding her face in both hands, he smiled.
"Hehe... I like you best." Kai'Sa leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, then smiled sweetly.
She was very direct about things like that, and she took his words at face value, truly believing she still looked pretty.
But Zihark had only praised her face, while what she had actually meant was her whole appearance.
In truth, once Kai'Sa's body was fully wrapped in Void armor, no normal person other than Zihark would ever be able to appreciate that tight, sinister, deeply unsettling kind of beauty.
In the eyes of the world, she would be described with one word and one word only.
Monster.
Watching Kai'Sa's innocent smile, Zihark began wondering what kind of misunderstanding his careless praise had planted in her mind.
For the moment, she would not suffer over the strange changes happening to her body. But if that illusion was shattered by someone else later, it would wound her deeply.
He had to start guiding her now, preparing her mentally and slipping in the right kind of reassurance from time to time, making sure she would not be crushed when reality hit all at once.
Otherwise, the few human ties she still had would blow apart completely, and she would end up confirming the label of monster with no road left back to human society.
And sooner or later, he would have to find a way to make her accept the name Kai'Sa as something more than what she was now.
If she asked how he knew that name, he could always brush it off as seeing the future. It was not as if people with that sort of power did not exist.
In fact, one of them just so happened to be the enemy who had ruined both their lives.
Kai'Sa noticed the sudden seriousness on Zihark's face and her smile fell at once.
"What is it now?"
"Nothing." Zihark folded his arms. "I just remembered something."
"What?"
"Oh, by the sun above, you already forgot?"
His exaggerated reaction only made Kai'Sa more confused.
"What did I forget?"
"Cough, cough." Zihark gave an especially dramatic cough. "You disobeyed me just now. Break the rules, and you get spanked. Remember? So stop stalling and bend over."
"Ah! No way!"
A moment later, the sounds of wrestling and noisy scuffling echoed through the tunnel.
...
Afterward.
Although Zihark did get his way and land the spanking in the end, he was not satisfied. The punishment still felt too light.
Kai'Sa was young now, but what if she developed some strange taste for it later and started breaking rules on purpose just to get spanked?
If the meaning of the punishment changed, the whole thing could get weird in a way best avoided.
He really did need to come up with a better way to keep Kai'Sa in line.
For now, the two of them were sitting halfway down the tunnel.
Zihark leaned back against the rock wall with his legs stretched out, while Kai'Sa, unable to sit because of her bruised tailbone, lay flat on the ground with her head resting comfortably on his lap, eyes closed in contentment.
In a place like this, it was easy to lose all sense of time.
Zihark had no idea what phase of day or night it was aboveground. He did not feel especially sleepy, but neither did he have enough energy to go hunting Voidlings.
So he gave Kai'Sa a gentle pat.
"You asleep?"
"Hm?" Kai'Sa tried to lift her head, but Zihark gently pressed it back down onto his lap.
"Just listen."
"Oh. What are you going to say?"
"A lot of things. But first, I'm going to teach you some things about Void creatures. Once we wake up, we'll be hunting again." He rolled her small earlobe lightly between his fingers, making her squirm a little.
"Okay. I'll listen."
"Then I hereby announce—Void 101 is now in session!"
[End of chapter]