Zihark finally looked away from the voidskin. Once he calmed down, he decided it really was not that big a deal.
To a voidskin that would devour anything, it was no more than another bowl of blood curd stew, or maybe just a Bloody Mary. Food was food. There was no deeper meaning to it.
You could not judge the Void through human sensibilities. The Void only knew how to consume.
Besides, it covered the smell of blood and saved them the trouble of finding anything to use as a pad. For all he knew, women in Runeterra might have even less to work with.
Still, the whole thing only made him want to separate the voidskin even more.
Kai'Sa watched his expression shift from shock, to anger, to relief, and finally to lingering resentment. It was so complicated that she gave up trying to follow it and simply said, "Why did you stop rubbing? I was starting to feel a lot better."
Zihark put his hand back on her stomach and began gently rubbing again, though his eyes had wandered elsewhere.
Normally, girls started developing before their first period. And since this was not Kai'Sa's first one, that meant...
He looked at her second skin. Her chest, once flat, really did seem to have the faintest new curve to it.
Maybe it was just his imagination, or maybe it was not. Using the Void cracks between the ribs of Kai'Sa's armor as a point of comparison, Zihark examined the matter with all the seriousness of a scientist trying to confirm whether she had officially entered puberty.
He remembered those cracks being tightly sealed before, like the lines between muscles pressed neatly together. But now they had been forced slightly apart, and purple Void light leaked out from the gaps.
When he leaned in for a closer look, he found that the purple glow was actually a woven lattice of light, like the threads showing through at a split seam in clothing. Only here, the strands were packed so tightly that there was no true gap, making it look almost like an opening into empty space.
As for what had opened those gaps in the first place... well, anyone who understood, understood.
Conclusion: Kai'Sa had already entered her growth stage.
She just had not noticed it herself.
Naturally, Zihark was pleased by this result. His first thought was that the hidden treasure he had been living beside was finally starting to shine.
Then again, realizing how much the girl beside him had quietly changed over these past two years left him a little sentimental too.
After her stomach had been rubbed for a while, Kai'Sa finally felt much better. She pushed herself up and looked around.
"Where are we?"
Zihark noticed that her voice still had not changed much. Her voice-breaking stage was probably still some time away.
"Where else would we be? Underground." Zihark had no idea what kind of question that was. Was it not obvious?
"No, look. What's that growing out of the wall over there?"
"Let me see..." Zihark moved closer and saw that the thing Kai'Sa was pointing at looked vaguely like roots embedded in the rock wall.
"Roots, maybe? Does that mean we're close to the surface?" Excited, Kai'Sa reached out to touch them, but Zihark stopped her at once.
"Those are definitely not roots. Look carefully before you touch anything."
Both of them lowered their helmets, and their vision shifted. The darkness in front of them suddenly stopped being an obstacle.
With their altered sight, they could now see the pale tendrils more clearly. They spiraled around one another in dead, lifeless twists, nothing like any plant they had ever seen. Their color had turned a chalky gray-white, like the hardened path left behind by dissolved organic matter as it grew.
No living thing could grow and reproduce down here.
This was the opposite of life.
"These are Void Scars. Proof that the Void once burst up from underground here."
The moment Zihark recognized them, he went on high alert. He did not dare touch them in the slightest. Holding one arm across Kai'Sa, he pushed her backward with him.
"Void... scar...?" Kai'Sa repeated the strange name with effort. She had no idea why Zihark was being so wary of something that was obviously dead.
"This thing dates all the way back to ancient Shurima. Don't be fooled just because it's been dormant for thousands of years and looks completely lifeless. Give it a single drop of blood, and it could wake up without warning and show its violent nature all over again."
"Its true body is much larger than you think. Imagine a column of magma erupting upward and suddenly freezing solid in the middle of the blast. No tree root could ever compare to it."
"That's terrifying..." Kai'Sa shrank her neck back. The part sticking out of the wall was only one small section. The much larger body was still buried behind the rock.
"Don't touch it. Let's go."
"Mm..." Kai'Sa glanced back once more at the strange root-like growths, then followed Zihark out of the tunnel.
Truthfully, Kai'Sa had not been entirely wrong.
In one sense, Void Scars really were like tree roots.
Both connected to the surface.
Not as directly as roots did, but seeing one still meant they were no longer very far from the world above.
Zihark simply had his own selfish reason for holding Kai'Sa back. He wanted her to wait a little longer, at least until he had solved the problem of separating the voidskin before they went up.
Void Scars were formed when pale bands of hardened matter solidified. Under the influence of the Void, organic matter melted into this pale substance, then could be reshaped into all kinds of biological structures.
A Void Scar had hardened before reaching that later stage, but that did not mean it was truly dead.
Less than a hundred meters above their heads, on the surface, a wagon loaded with birdcages sped through the desert at the edge of Shurima.
On both sides of the road stretched wind-carved badlands. Beneath the sand were countless hidden stones, and every so often one jabbed painfully into the feet of the beast pulling the cart, drawing out an irritated cry from the Skallashi.
"Easy, girl. I don't like this damn road either. But if we can save even a single day, that's money in the pocket."
"If we can make it to Tejaru before nightfall... then we can reach the Suiyin Market before the festival and make a killing."
The bird seller spoke to the Skallashi as if it could understand him.
A Skallashi was a gentle desert beast about the size of a camel, but with a head more like an alpaca, long ears, a short snout, and two small antler-like horns. It could run for long stretches the way a horse could.
If camels were the ships of the desert, then Skallashi were its speedboats. In the perilous deserts of Shurima, faster and tougher Skallashi were often better than camels at carrying their masters away from danger.
That was why these animals were even more valuable than camels, and the bird seller's attitude toward his mount made that perfectly clear.
"Rrraah—"
The Skallashi let out another grumbling cry, and the bird seller immediately tried to soothe it as though calming a child.
"Of course there'll be peaches. Once I sell these sand falcons, I'll buy enough peaches to fill a whole cart. Just wait and see, good girl."
The Skallashi seemed to understand. It immediately started running with even more energy.
Juicy fruit was a Skallashi's favorite treat. They were far more pampered than camels. Then again, you got what you paid for, and their greater intelligence was one of the reasons they cost so much.
The bird seller kept shouting encouragement, and neither man nor beast noticed the pale gray tendrils lying half-buried in the sand ahead.
The instant the wagon wheel rolled over them, the dead-looking tendrils suddenly burst with sinister purple light. Like vines springing back to life, they lashed out in an instant and wrapped around the Skallashi and the entire wagon.
"Wahhh!!" The bird seller let out a startled scream. Beneath them, the sand and gravel surged upward as something moved below, and then the ground abruptly caved in, opening a crater five meters across.
Man, beast, and even the sand falcons trapped inside the cages—
not one of them escaped being dragged down into the underground world.
[End of chapter]