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Piltover’s Defender of Tomorrow dies on Wednesday evening. By Thursday, the announcement hits the morning gazette, and it won’t leave the news cycle until well past the Sunday edition.
Zaun’s Machine Herald scoffs the first time he reads it, tossing the stained and torn paper that his apprentice brought down the conveyor behind his shoulder. He is rewiring his left arm again, trying to iron out why his sensors detect a microsecond’s delay between the synapses firing in his brain and the acknowledgement by his mechanical nerves.
“Natural causes,” he scoffs. “He is what? Sixty years old? Men that rich do not die that young.”
The Machine Herald’s apprentice, Naph, frowns, but doesn’t respond. He taps the air bubbles out of a thick glass syringe.
“Turn your head,” Naph says.
“It must be some kind of ploy,” the Herald continues as if uninterrupted, “a trick, to bring me out of hiding! Well, it will not work!” He twists the screwdriver inside his arm angrily, then tries to hide his wince behind a scowl.
“Turn your head,” Naph repeats dully. A drop of viscous liquid beads at the tip of the needle.
He reaches out and tilts the Herald’s chin, earning a sharp snap of teeth but no other resistance. He brushes the Herald’s increasingly grey hair behind his ear, then lines the tip of the needle up against the junction of the Herald’s jaw.
He can’t speak without jostling the needle, so the Herald is forced to keep his mouth shut for the duration of the injection. Naph pushes the needle in smoothly, the motion practiced and unhurried. He draws it out a bit, letting the quiet linger while he can, before pressing down the plunger and watching the liquid disappear underneath his mentor’s skin. When he removes the needle, it leaves a small raised bump, but Naph is practiced enough by now that he doesn’t even blink. He tosses the used syringe into a tin container and pours some antiseptic onto a cloth, pressing it to the inflamed injection site.
By the following week, a funeral date has been announced. As it approaches, the Machine Herald becomes increasingly disturbed, constantly on edge. He is still waiting for the Defender to reveal himself, for the trap to go off. The longer he waits, the more bitter he grows, spitting highly personal insults out into the empty air, as if the Defender is hiding somewhere nearby, always listening and only one offense away from revealing himself.
The Herald’s apprentice has been making excuses to leave the workshop more regularly, preferring to wander the edges of Zaun in a search for overpriced components that he doesn’t need. Even there, he can’t escape talk of the Defender’s death, but at least the shopkeepers and street rats aren’t stuck in an endless loop of angry denial. Not that Zaunites are inclined to trusting what the Piltovan news says but– well, everybody but Viktor could see it.
Three counts of drunk and disorderly conduct within the last year. A very public breakdown last Progress Day where he had to be escorted off the stage by the Sheriff. The enforcers had found him the next morning, passed out on the floor of his personal conveyor. Viktor never commented on it, but Naph knows that they both knew where the Defender was headed.
What he’s saying is– natural causes is a very polite way to refer to alcohol poisoning. Sixty isn’t that young when you’ve been drinking heavily for over half of it, not to mention the health complications that come from spending all your time between drinks crushed below falling buildings and getting shot in the chest by lasers.
Viktor has forgotten, Naph thinks, that the average person can’t just walk off repeated concussions. Most people don’t have reinforced skeletons, or nanobots inside their joints that can rebuild lost cartilage. The Defender had been missing more lately when he and the Herald fought, his swings going wide and his shots firing nearly entire meters off their targets. The Herald would taunt him about getting soft or getting old, and the Defender would bite back something witty about Zaun’s darkness or Viktor’s ugliness making him miss. Naph thinks about the woman he built cybernetic eyes for – delicate, twitching things that he crammed hundreds of tiny sensors into – after she had lost her vision working in the forges for twenty years straight. He thinks about the blinding blue glow of the Mercury Cannon, always centimeters away from the Defender’s wide, dilated pupils.
He thinks about how Viktor never mentions retirement, never even seems to consider death a possibility, despite how closely it looms, the way its stench lingers in the air around him.
He wonders if he should pay a visit to Blitzcrank. He mentally catalogs his upcoming appointments and reassesses. He sighs.
Maybe after the funeral.
The Defender of Tomorrow's funeral is to be held on the following Saturday. It is a public affair, but an understated one, another point the Herald uses to try and argue that it cannot be real. He will be buried in neither the Giopara burial gardens nor the Ferros mausoleum, but one of Piltover’s small yet neatly maintained graveyards on the edge of the city border. The ones for people without a house name or who aren’t important enough to a clan to be ushered under their wings.
“If the Defender were really dead, he would have something as gaudy and ostentatious as he is,” the Herald insists, “or else something completely cut off from anyone who does not empty their pockets for the right to sob over his memory. He always wants to be the center of attention, and men like him always get what they want.”
The Herald’s apprentice doesn't argue, but he's thinking about the one very obvious thing that the Defender wanted and never got.
“I think it's time to start lowering the dosage,” he says instead, injecting the syringe below the Herald's jaw.
The Herald shakes his head, waving away the thought like a pestering fly.
“No, no, we will do it next week. It is too busy right now. I need to be ready when the Defender resurfaces.”
Naph frowns. The Herald’s emotional suppression injections are, in Naph's opinion, completely useless. He'd tried them once and felt absolutely no change, but Viktor insists that they work. In the end, it doesn't really matter if he overuses them – while the injection would wreak absolute havoc on a normal human's liver, Viktor can just filter the toxins out of his own augmented organs with a sieve and magnet.
Usually, they run it on a schedule. Full dosage for two weeks, then another on a half-dose to slowly wane the Herald off of the drug, then one fully without it, to keep his tolerance up and drain all the accumulated waste. Viktor swears that he can feel it losing effectiveness if he stays on it too long, and Naph can agree that he certainly gets moodier, though he’s sure he could inject Viktor with nothing but saline everyday for the exact same results.
It’s not a good sign that Viktor is insisting he stay on the suppressant. Normally he’s strict about keeping to his schedule, maintaining regular blood work and evaluating any side effects he experiences with a critical eye. Naph wonders how long this tenuous peace can last.
“The funeral,” the Herald says, once Naph has cleaned the injection site and disposed of the needle, “must be when he plans to reveal himself. A large public event will draw the eye, allowing him to strike while my defenses are low. He’s holding it away from his sponsors’ land so as to keep any property damage he plans to inflict removed from his sources of income.” Naph sighs internally.
“So are you going, then?” He thinks Viktor should. He thinks he’ll regret it if he doesn’t.
The Machine Herald pauses, tapping a metal finger against the table in front of him. “I am still unsure if he will emerge there, or if he will anticipate my going, and instead ransack my workshop while I am away.”
“I’ll stay here,” Naph says. Viktor tilts his head, but continues to tap at the table absentmindedly. “Someone should go, and I don’t know Piltover as well as you. Leave a bug here, I’ll set it off if anything happens so you can come back.”
“I suppose if he does return at the so-called ‘funeral,’ it would be more beneficial that I attend,” the Herald muses. “The Sheriff and her dog will be there, not to mention the Shadow,” he spits the title out with obvious distaste, before returning to a more neutral tone, “and I am better equipped for crowd control than you are.” He flexes his third arm, and Naph tries to force a smile. He hopes Viktor doesn’t engage anyone in an actual fight at the funeral. Without the Defender to– well, not go easy on him, but to at least flinch in the face of that final lethal hit… Naph doesn’t know how well the Herald would fare against Piltover’s elite forces. Maybe on a better day, one where he had slept in the last forty-eight hours and eaten something other than stale protein blocks within the week, but today? Naph wouldn’t put his money on it.
The Herald arrives at the funeral just before it begins. He wears a thick cloak, and blends into the shadows of the trees that line the mid-sized uppercity graveyard. He hasn’t been here in years. He used to accompany Jayce here sometimes, to the small House Talis plot that held his father. Jayce’s mother isn't buried in it, he knows, though Ximena passed long after Viktor had left the academy in disgrace. She's buried somewhere else in the graveyard, a long-standing and overly complicated family feud that kept her from ever being officially accepted into the Talis house.
It turns Viktor's stomach that Jayce would disgrace his mother's final resting place with a ploy like this. Piltover’s public wouldn't blink twice at burying him somewhere inside the sprawling Giopara or Ferros plots. This is how Viktor knows that it is for him. A layer of realism painted over an obvious ruse, designed to make him question the blatant truth. It is a message, written between the lines of the bland yet flowery obituary printed in the Piltover Gazette, one that only Viktor knows how to decipher.
His eyes are better than the humans’ that surround him, and he can see the headstone clearly from where he lurks in the back of the crowd. Can see where lichen was only recently scraped smooth, can compare the sharp lines of the freshly carved characters next to those that have been eroded and faded with time.
Mère et Fils Bien-Aimés
Ximena Carrillo 936 - 1009
Jayce Giopara née Carrillo 959 - 1019
It’s plain. Oddly tasteful, considering its supposed occupant. He probably didn't want to overspend on an engraving that would be rendered moot in a few hours, Viktor tells himself. His grip on his cane tightens.
Jayce used to get morbid and talk about his own death often. This was before Viktor's diagnosis, back before he cordoned off the entire topic as too distasteful to ever mention, a false kind of optimism that he plastered over every aspect of his persona. Like pretending Viktor wasn't dying would keep him alive. Like pretending that their relationship wasn't already laying in shattered pieces at their feet could keep it intact.
This was before that, though, early in their partnership. They were lying on the floor of Jayce's dorm (it had better air conditioning), supposedly doing homework. Jayce was falling behind in all his classes and trying to blame it on being stuck in inpatient for two weeks. Viktor had told him that if Jayce didn't want to fail, he shouldn't have checked himself in in the first place.
“Should I have just killed myself?” Jayce had asked, and Viktor had pretended to consider the question seriously.
“If you had,” he'd said, “they'd be able to put your perfect GPA on your headstone. Now what do you have going for you? Alive, certainly, but Heimerdinger will give you such a look when he sees the proposal you've submitted for his thermal mechanics course.”
Jayce had laughed, the loud kind of laugh that made people glare at him in theaters and that showed all of his teeth.
“Here lies Jayce Talis,” he’d joked, “If he hadn't been so crazy, he would've been really great at school.”
Viktor patted his arm in mock sympathy. “Here lies Jayce Talis. A pleasure to have in class.”
Jayce had laughed again, and Viktor had taken it in hungrily. Even then, he'd known to savor the sight of Jayce's head thrown back in delight, the glimpse of his molars and the line of stubble he'd missed while shaving that clung to the space between his neck and jaw.
“What do you want them to do with your remains after you die?” Jayce asked after a few minutes of peaceful silence punctuated only by the sound of pen on parchment. “The guy who sits next to me in advanced crystology told me if you get cremated they can, like, pressurize the ashes into a diamond.”
Viktor wrinkled his nose, and Jayce snorted. “Yeah, I know. It sounds like it sucks. You should hear what he has to say about quasicrystals’ grain boundaries– I mean, gods, why am I trying to kill myself when they’re letting people like that in?”
“It sounds expensive,” Viktor said, ignoring Jayce’s tangent. “What is the point if I am already dead?”
“What else are you going to spend your money on?” Jayce pointed out. “You're dead.”
That was fair. Viktor had no parents, no living family at all that he could name. He had no next of kin and certainly no (romantic) partner to leave anything to.
“What money?” He'd joked instead. He crossed out an equation harshly, ink bleeding through the thin parchment onto the floor. The conversation died as Jayce jumped up to grab a handkerchief, bemoaning his security deposit as he attempted to mop up the stained hardwood.
He'd asked, later, what Jayce wanted done with his own remains. Asked it with a weight that hadn’t been present before. Viktor had broken into a series of hacking coughs during a group presentation, which the professor had used as an excuse to lower the entire group’s grade. Another point of division drawn between Viktor and his fellow classmates. He’d needed a distraction from Jayce’s righteous anger, from his pacing and threats to go to the administration – thus, the question.
Jayce had taken a seat next to him, the library study room reserved and thankfully soundproofed against Jayce's more creative admonishments, and sighed before answering.
He had said that he wanted to be buried in the same grave as whoever he married, the way his parents had wished to be. Failing that, he said, he would be buried with his mother.
You may be the neediest son in the world, Viktor hadn’t said. He didn’t ask either if Ximena knew about this plan, or if she had her own affairs in place for if Jayce died young. Jayce liked to think of himself as a pillar of support for his mother, standing strong before her and protecting her from the burden of his father’s early death and the pressure put on her by his paternal relatives. Viktor kept to himself that the multiple suicide attempts had likely shattered any illusion of stability Ximena might have held. He was quite sure she kept up the ruse for the same reason he did – Jayce felt his best when he was able to think of himself as helpful.
Jayce’s relationship with his mother was a continual mystery for Viktor, one that he had given up attempting to understand. Jayce loved his mother, probably more than anyone else in the world, but they also rarely spoke without an undercurrent of resentment, simmering unspoken on both sides. The suicide attempts went unaddressed. Ximena’s months of near-catatonic depression after Jayce’s father died – a contrast to her episodes of twitching-energy and irrational fear that originally drove her to take her young son into a blizzard and attempt to walk the route to Piltover when their train was delayed – were an equally avoided topic. When she had Jayce admitted – the first time – he was livid. Viktor still remembers him yelling at her as enforcers held him back, face tear stained and ruddy-red, his hair greasy and plastered to his forehead with a layer of sweat.
If I’m crazy, so are you!
He thought it might’ve been the only time they’d gotten close to touching at the core of their fractured relationship. Jayce was sedated soon after, and Ximena had broken into tears that Viktor had not felt equipped to deal with. Nowadays Jayce turns himself in. It’s easier on everyone.
“I'll be there to keep her company either way,” Jayce said, “I mean, it's either right next to her or right above her, you know?”
Viktor, whose parents had been buried in a sinking graveyard barely above sea level, one which had predictably flooded and then been declared ‘unsanitary’ before it was promptly cleared out and condemned by the Piltovan authorities barely a year after he’d paid an arm and a leg to have his parents buried there, did not know. He never got a refund, nor his parents' remains returned.
“What if your spouse has their own House or Clan plot that they wish to be buried in?”
“They can either be buried next to my mama or without me,” Jayce said, as if it was obvious. His self-centeredness never failed to astound Viktor – as if his hypothetical spouse would not have a mother of their own, or family traditions that they may value over Jayce's. He supposed that's why Jayce never dated much.
“You never answered, you know,” Jayce said, “what you want done with your remains.”
Throw my ashes into the sea. Donate my organs to the Academy. Plant a tree. Embalm me and never let me rot. Keep my pressurized diamond corpse as a paperweight.
Viktor had thought about it before. Of course he had. It was just that the thought of it – any of it, no matter how tasteful – turned his stomach. He didn't want to die. Wanting never stopped death from barreling towards him, though, inevitable as a freight train.
“I think I would like to be buried with your mother too,” he’d said, deadpan. “Keep her company while you're off rotting with your wife.”
Jayce had told him to fuck off, but he'd laughed again as he said it, shining and perfect. Viktor took in the bob of his throat and thought, horribly and embarrassingly irrationally, it doesn’t matter, neither of us will ever die.
The Council does not breathe a sigh of relief at the announcement of the Defender’s death, but it's a close call. Piltover, the people of Piltover that is, loves the Defender, but practically, and certainly economically, he has far outlasted his usefulness.
When was the last time Jayce Giopara published a paper? When was the last time he invented something useful, let alone revolutionary? When was the last time he left the house sober, stayed for an entire meeting, or responded to any reprimand from the council with anything more than a scoff?
His insistence, year after year, that the greatest threat facing Piltover was the Machine Herald had, over time, become blisteringly transparent in its selfishness. He refused to take on the badge. He was deliberately horrible at working in a team. He was seemingly unable to care about anything that wasn’t relocating precious resources towards tracking a man who hadn’t posed a tangible threat towards Piltover in years.
Yet, despite all this, the people loved him. So the Council learned to eat their losses and make do with what they could. Put him on posters, sell little collapsible hammers on Progress Day, have him make speeches and smile into the cameras and allocate just enough money to his pointless stalemates to keep him from becoming a hermit.
So when he is announced dead, the council isn’t all that concerned. They can close the book on the Defender of Tomorrow, send him off as an honored hero and keep his image hung up for the next year or so to placate the public and encourage Academy enrollment. The Giopara and Ferros Clans will have one last fight over which one gets to open a scholarship under his name, and both will simmer with resentment over the Defender’s choice of burial. Clan Giopara will erect a statue in their own private graveyard, and Clan Ferros will dedicate a new wing of their commercial forge to his legacy.
It's easy. It's clean. There's some worry, of course, over whether or not the Herald will lash out against Piltover without the Defender to hold him back, but it is a residual, distant fear. It has been a long time since the elite of Piltover lost sleep over the machinations of the Machine Herald.
Amaranthine arrives at the funeral dressed, of course, in black. She’s grown out of the frills and bows that defined her childhood silhouette, trading them for unobtrusively expensive practicality; petticoats and layers of tulle turned in for straight cut dresses and long leather coats. Her hair is pinned back in a deceptively elaborate updo. She’s itching to pull it out, to unstick every hidden bobby pin and run her hands through the gel-crisp strands.
Jayce used to let her tangle her little fingers in his hair after his speeches. She would gag exaggeratingly at the texture, then break into a laugh as she spiked it upwards and into absurd shapes. After she’d washed her hands of the sticky gel, she would make Jayce paint her nails, shades of pink and powder blue and yellow. He wasn’t very good at it, but he would let her paint his after, and she’d be worse.
She didn’t paint her own nails for the funeral. She went and got them done at a boutique in Piltover, a black gloss gel with blunt squared tips. She could’ve done it herself, she thinks. She sure paid an awful lot for something that no one will notice. But she knows appearances matter. Here and now more than anywhere else.
She doesn’t have any cue cards to fiddle with. She has her speech memorized. Guests haven’t arrived yet, but chairs have been set up around the site. The grave has been dug. The stone has been carved. One could call it tasteful, which is the last word that anyone who knew him would use to describe Jayce. A thin veneer of class obscuring the fact that it's all going in the dirt anyway, down to the worms and maggots, who don’t care about the price of orchestra rentals or stonecutters or funeral directors.
“Ama.”
A voice breaks her out of her reverie. She turns around, pivoting in her sharp stiletto heels, and finds herself face to face with the Sheriff. She looks older than Amaranthine remembers last seeing her – lines around her eyes and bursts of grey streaking through her dark hair.
“Hello, Auntie Cait,” she says. Polite. Not as distant as she has been, as she maybe still should be. Amaranthine needs all the familiarity she can get right now.
Jayce and Caitlyn stopped talking a little before Amaranthine left for university. Something about his drinking, something about how he couldn't let go. Nothing new, just old tensions that finally boiled over. She remembers Caitlyn telling Jayce that he was unfit to raise a child. She remembers Jayce crying over the toilet that night. She’d gathered him up as best she could and led him up to bed, stroking his hair and wiping his red and swollen eyes.
She’d stopped responding to Caitlyn’s letters after that. A line drawn in the sand, a side chosen. Jayce never told her to, but it felt important at the time. Now, with Jayce gone, the tide rolls in, and Amaranthine allows herself to be drawn into her aunt’s arms.
“Oh, sprout,” Caitlyn coos. She used to run her hands through Amaranthine’s hair when she cried, but now, with her hair slicked solid and pinned back, Caitlyn compromises by rubbing small circles into her back. Amaranthine always hated that she never grew as tall as Jayce, but she’s glad to be shorter than Caitlyn, still able to tuck herself neatly into her arms like she did as a child.
She doesn’t tell Amaranthine that it’s okay. She doesn’t say anything. Just holds her as Amaranthine blinks back tears. “I’ll ruin my makeup,” she sniffs into Caitlyn’s neck, and Caitlyn laughs softly, patting her back one more time before pulling away.
Another figure comes up behind Caitlyn, one Amaranthine didn’t notice in her daze. Amaranthine takes her in. The way she can’t stop adjusting the collar of her trim black suit is familiar, as is the way her eyes flit around the perimeter of the yard, calculating and constantly on edge. The greys in her hair are new though, the short cropped cut doing nothing to hide them.
“Auntie Vi,” Amaranthine sighs, and pulls Vi towards her into a shorter and more awkward hug. She’d loved Vi as a kid but was never quite sure to interact with her as an adult.
Caitlyn and Vi were the closest thing she had to an extended family as a child. When she was young, she would clamber up Vi’s body, swinging on her arms and cackling as Vi tossed her up onto her shoulders. Jayce did the best voices for stories, but Vi’s were funnier and the stories she made up were always an age-inappropriate level of violent and gory, much to Amaranthine’s glee and Jayce’s resignation.
Their house was huge too, and it wasn’t empty and white like Jayce’s. To a young Amaranthine, it felt like a castle. To an adult Amaranthine, it probably still would. Caitlyn’s family had lived there for generations and it showed. It helped that she was always able to talk Caitlyn into letting her use her family’s expensive china for tea parties, even as Caitlyn would sit straight-backed and awkward on the edge of her little wooden chair, simultaneously formal and condescending. She would keep her pinky out at a perfect angle and Amaranthine would imitate her accent until Vi bowed over from laughing and they would drink Demacian tea heavy with milk and sugarcubes, even though none of them preferred it.
As she grew up and as Jayce deteriorated, she stopped wanting to play. All the once-whispered tensions between Caitlyn and Jayce became tensions between Caitlyn-and-Vi and Jayce-and-Amaranthine. An eight year old was already pushing it in terms of interest in tea parties, and by fifteen Amaranthine felt she had nothing to say to her aunts when it seemed like they expected her to behave like a rambunctious baby doll.
“Hey, kid,” Vi responds, patting her on the back and pulling away, taking stock of the venue again as she bounces from foot to foot, “how’re you holding up?”
Amaranthine flattens nonexistent wrinkles out of her skirt. “I’m fine,” she says. She turns back to Caitlyn, suddenly desperate to escape, the relief of seeing familiar faces doused by the reminder that they are seeing her in turn. “Are you giving a speech?”
Caitlyn clears her throat awkwardly. “If you’re agreeable, yes. Obviously, it’s up to you, but they wanted someone from a higher house to speak, and I figured…”
“Better you than Cassius Giopara,” Amaranthine finishes.
“Or Camille Ferros,” Caitlyn says. “She wanted to speak, you know. I can’t remember her mentioning him once in the last year without a complaint, but now she wants to offer an eulogy. I found it tasteless. Albus, maybe I could’ve accepted, if he was still here, but…”
Amaranthine wants to ask if Caitlyn ever commiserated with the Ferros Clan head in her frustrations. It’s a cruel impulse. For all of Caitlyn’s problems with Jayce, she was never a gossip, and certainly never a friend of Camille Ferros.
“Do you plan on speaking?” Caitlyn asks. “You don’t have to, of course–”
“I am,” Amaranthine interrupts. She lets the surprise on Caitlyn’s face wash over her and tries not to let it chafe. “He was my father,” she justifies, even though she knows she doesn’t have to.
“Of course he was,” Vi says, stepping forward to put a hand on Amaranthine’s shoulder. “We just weren’t sure if– He always wanted to keep you out of the public eye.”
That’s true. Jayce was the kind of public figure who existed as less of a person and more of an idea, an image only supported by the choice he had made to stop accepting interviews shortly after he took Amaranthine in. She wasn’t a secret; everyone who knew him knew her – she stood backstage at all his speeches and he would take her along to suit tailorings and fancy parties. But he never signed her up for acting classes or had her put in advertisements, and the public lost interest without something sensational to latch onto. She became a factoid for Defender superfans – but not as herself, only as the blurry idea of a daughter, an extension of the legend.
The childhood allure of fame was shattered quickly after meeting Jayce. No one else was privy to the bags under his eyes that he covered with makeup, the days where he could barely keep down a meal from the stress. No one else knew him well enough to notice the glassiness that came over his gaze when he stepped up on stage or nodded along to small talk.
She never wanted to take on the public scrutiny that Jayce was constantly drowning under, but his death has left a hole in the public consciousness that someone will need to fill. Camille Ferros did not offer to give Jayce’s eulogy out of the kindness of her heart.
Amaranthine doesn’t want it, but all children inherit things they didn’t ask for.
The funeral seats fill quickly, but it deters no one. The rest of the public just crowds behind them, faux-somber in their dark dresses and suits, hunger shining in their eyes. A band is playing, something superficially mournful that would be to better effect if the violinist was not so painfully off-key. The sun beats down on the back of the Herald’s neck, his fans whirring softly beneath his cloak. He is not used to standing in Piltover’s heat anymore. When was the last time he came topside during the day rather than some heist of the Defender’s workshop during the dead of night?
The sun used to make him sneeze, he remembers. He detested it, just as he did all things in Piltover. The way the sun made him sneeze, the way the humidity made his hair curl, the persistent warmth that seemed to linger under Jayce’s skin while it rejected Viktor. Viktor could never hold on to it the same way, it would sap out of him like water through a sieve. Jayce held enough for both of them.
If he was really dead, the Herald muses, this would be an ironic reversal. He runs hot now, burning circuits under conductive metal plating. Whatever body they’re burying under the Defender’s name will lie cold and still beneath the earth, down where the sun can’t reach.
He is not really dead, though, the Herald knows. He keeps his eyes peeled, inspecting each guest who crosses his path for that familiar gait or the hint of a concealed weapon.
He finds nothing. The funeral begins, the band coming to a halting and unsynchronized close. Caitlyn Kiramman steps up to a podium. She fiddles with the microphone for a moment. Someone in the crowd coughs.
The Herald keeps turning his head, certain that the Defender is about to come up behind him. He can feel his eyes on him, somewhere in the crowd, an itch he can’t quite scratch. He focuses on the sensation of fans rotating under his skin and tries to tune out the incessant drone of the Sheriff’s voice.
Where is he? He thinks. This is almost boring. Routine. There’s nothing showy or ironic, no tongue in cheek jokes. The Sheriff looks as though she has been crying.
A sliver of doubt creeps in. Would Jayce go so far as to let the woman he saw as a sister believe him dead? Just to sell the lie?
“Piltover will forever mourn the loss of one of its brightest minds,” the Sheriff continues, “Jayce loved this city, and he never wanted anything more than to push it forward into a new era of enlightenment and progress. Everyone here has been touched by his kindness in some way, even those who never met him. He is– he was a beacon of hope, for all of Piltover to aspire to. Jayce represented the foundation that we built this great city upon: the hope for a better tomorrow. Thank you.”
She steps out from behind the podium, and Viktor tries to shake the feeling of insects crawling through his wires. This shameless mythologizing, the Sheriff’s flat voice and empty eyes, the dead air humming through the neglected microphone. None of this is right. This isn’t how it was supposed to go.
Amaranthine steps up to the podium, and Viktor’s knees nearly buckle out from beneath him. She looks so impossibly young, and so impossibly sad.
He remembers the first time he saw her, peeking out from behind the Defender’s legs during a routine robbery of his lab. Viktor had stumbled, then gestured towards her with indignation. He remembers asking where she came from, and hissing as the Defender raised one perfect eyebrow and responded in a mocking tone well, when two people love each other very much–
He’d managed to piece together, eventually, that Jayce had not been a part of some ill-fated affair that had left him alone to raise a child, but had instead picked her up off the street like one would a Zaunite orphan. He'd admired her shrewd business sense, to know exactly which topsider would be gullible enough to fall for a pair of puppy dog eyes and a sob story. She couldn't know – or perhaps she did – that Jayce was about the same age when his mother had moved them to Piltover and married Jayce's father. He was more susceptible than most to the wiles of a lonely child in need of a parent.
The Herald watched from the sidelines as she grew older, only seeing her in fits and spurts when he would venture topside to steal something or to interrupt one of the Defender’s speaking engagements. He was never particularly impressed. Naph, in comparison, had taken to the sciences quickly and with a vicious passion. He asked intelligent questions and could hold a welding torch with relative stability. Blitzcrank, too, had things that they cared about at least. Piltovan children are too stagnant in their luxury, and Jayce was too soft to push his daughter towards reaching her full potential.
He remembers the corner of the Defender's home workshop that was clearly dedicated to Amaranthine, which was at first covered in a layer of colored pencils and sketchbooks, turning to fiction novels and nail polish as the years went on. There was a brief period, perhaps in Amaranthine's early teens, where it had housed a sewing machine and a half-finished garment of some sort that the Herald had looked on with mild interest, but the next time he broke into the Defender's home it was gone. The passing fancies of a rich young woman. She must have gone to university at some point, though for what he has no clue. Must have a job, too, unless she's too rich for that.
She has put aside the ruffled nightgowns and braided pigtails that the Herald associated with her rare appearances. The dress she wears is sleek and expensive, obviously custom tailored. Her hair cut short and pulled tight behind her head, an appearance strikingly reminiscent of the way Jayce would slick back his own back at the academy. The amount of hair gel the man would go through in a year was absurd, but he claimed he hated the feeling of his hair in face. He'd looked so offended when Viktor suggested he just shave it off.
“Thank you all for coming,” Amaranthine begins, and the Herald blinks back into the present. “I know my father would be grateful and touched to see how deeply this city's love for him runs.”
A murmur through the crowd. The Herald frowns. He supposes Amaranthine never attracted the same audience as her father – perhaps this is most of Piltover's first time putting a face to the Defender’s ward.
“My father,” Amaranthine continues, raising her voice slightly over the din, “dedicated his life to this city. His dream, one which I think we call all agree that he achieved, was to push Piltover forward, both in his work as a scientist and researcher at our esteemed Piltover Academy, and in, what you all know him for, his work as Piltover’s own Defender of Tomorrow.”
The Herald grits his teeth behind the mask. The Defender did push Piltover forward, certainly, if forward was the direction that further widened the gap between the twin cities. Tightening the leash, is how the Herald would put it. Pressing Piltover’s boot down on Zaun’s neck, maybe.
Whose tomorrow are you defending?
A question the Herald asked more than once in the heat of battle. In the early days, the Defender would yell out some kind of rebuttal – everyone’s, from you! – but over time he stopped responding altogether and the Herald had moved on to jabs that could still elicit a reaction.
“He put his life on the line everyday to protect this city from threats that, despite his best efforts, continue to endanger the citizens of this city. The stress of this burden took its toll on my father’s health, but he persisted, because he knew that what he was doing was necessary.”
Another murmur through the crowd. The Herald tenses, half expecting the Defender to grip him by the back of his neck and lift into the air, revealing himself and eliminating the threat once and for all. Nothing comes. Amaranthine continues speaking.
“Most of you here today have never met me, but I feel as though I know all of you. We share a connection, not of blood, but through our mutual love and gratitude to my father. My father did his best to keep me shielded from the public-facing aspects of his work as I grew up, a fact for which I am grateful. But my father’s work is not done–”
A loud commotion somewhere near the front of the crowd interrupts Amaranthine. The Herald notices her face twitch, something unrecognizable breaking through her stoic mask for a moment, a twitch of her eyebrow and a quirk of her lips, but it’s gone before he can register what it means.
“My father’s work is not done,” Amaranthine repeats. “The threats he fought to protect us from are still very present, and will only continue to spread in his absence. This city needs a Defender. That is why, with my father’s blessing, I will be taking up the name in his stead.”
An uproar. The Herald barely hears it. A ringing in his ears. Amaranthine’s expressionless face overlooking the crowd. Someone next to him is clapping. What is going on? It wasn’t supposed to go like this. He doesn’t understand what this play is. What does the Defender gain from this ploy? Is this his way of escaping into retirement, running away and leaving someone else to clean up his mess? But it doesn’t make sense.
There’s a loud shout from the front of the crowd, something angry that is quickly drowned out by the elated cheering of the larger audience. People are happy, the Herald realizes. They are grateful that they still have a Defender to look up to, that Jayce’s daughter has taken on the burden she claims drew her father into an early death. He feels sick. Where is Jayce? This doesn’t make any sense.
“I will answer any questions you may have in a press conference tomorrow morning at the Kirammen Memorial Garden,” Amaranthine calls over the crowd, her voice commanding and surprisingly stable. “Today is not about me. I simply wanted to reassure the citizens of Piltover that they will not be forgotten – The Machine Herald’s reign of terror will never touch their homes or come for their children. This is the same hope that my father had for me, and one I will continue to have – for Piltover’s tomorrow.”
A chill down the Herald’s spine. Amaranthine doesn’t look at him, no one has given any indication that they know he’s here at all, but still. His name, called out over the suddenly boisterous audience, all hungry for his blood. And Amaranthine here, on stage, calling for it. Where is Jayce? The chill of doubt settles over Viktor’s body. This is a funeral. This is Jayce’s funeral. Where is Jayce? Where are they keeping him?
It has been a week since he died. Longer than Viktor has ever attempted to bring someone back, but he could do it. He knows he could. He already has most of the parts ready, he’s been planning for this for what feels like his whole life. It wasn’t supposed to be so soon, or it wasn’t supposed to be like this, but it– it can still work. Drain his blood, surely mostly evaporated by now, reinforce his sunken veins and fill them with Viktor’s own mixture of artificial hemoglobin and chemtech. Plug in the mechanical heart that Viktor has had sitting in his lab for years, reinforce his ribcage with titanium plating– It’s going to be fine. He has a plan.
“Today, I am here to bury my father, surrounded by the people that he loved the most: the citizens of Piltover. I hope you will all join me in a moment of silence in remembering Jayce Giopara, both as the Defender, and as my father.”
Maybe the crowd is silent. Viktor doesn’t know. He can’t hear anything over the pounding of his mechanical heart. Amaranthine pulls a small bronze urn from beneath the pedestal.
Cremated. Jayce was cremated.
I’ll never be like you, he’d shouted more than once. Viktor thought it an empty threat. Surely one day, Jayce would wake up and see the error of his ways. He’d come crawling back to Viktor, apologies on his lips and begging to be augmented. He’d lie on the operating table, nervous maybe, but perfectly compliant, and let Viktor cut into his sternum and pull apart his ribcage and trust him to retie every nerve connection with perfect care and they could marvel together as his weak and malleable flesh became something beautiful and impervious. And he’d say that he was sorry, and Viktor would forgive him, and then–
And then–
A hopeless dream. Not logical at all. There’s something wet on his face, fogging up his mask. Why did he think–? He was so sure that Jayce would come back to him. Now he doesn’t know how he ever thought that. What does it say about him, if all this time he assumed himself unable to be controlled by emotions, and in his conviction allowed himself to ignore the most obvious conclusion. That Jayce really did hate him, that he was disgusted by his form and his ideals. That Jayce would rather force his daughter into a war with his once-partner than ever allow himself to be brought back as something he saw as inhuman.
He turns away before they bury the urn. He can’t bear to watch. Some time in the past week, without Viktor realizing at all, Jayce had gone from a living man to a body that could be repaired to a pile of ashes. He hadn’t even had the chance to step in and save him. If he'd acted as soon as the news broke – snuck into the mortuary or hospital or crematorium or wherever they were keeping him and smuggled Jayce out – Jayce would be alive. Hesitation born of irrational, impossible denial means that chance has been taken from him forever.
The walk back to Emberflit leaves Viktor numb. He feels as though he is floating through a dream, the landscape unrecognizable in the face of his realization. Muscle memory guides his feet home, turns the key in the lock, and opens his door.
When Viktor slumps into a chair at his workbench, he realizes that he is shaking. He doesn't know how. His metal body shouldn't respond to emotional stimuli the way a flesh one would. Not to mention the emotional suppressant that Naph injected just this morning, a full dose.
But the results speak for themselves. Viktor releases his mask's mechanisms with a hiss, his face suddenly far too constricted, and takes in great gulping gasps of air that he shouldn't need.
He used to walk Jayce through panic attacks, back at the Academy, but Jayce always told him he was awful at it.
You're supposed to make me list, like, stimuli in the environment. Five things I can see, four I can hear, that stuff. It's meant to be grounding.
That is stupid, Viktor had responded, keeping his hands tight around Jayce’s. I'm here, aren’t I? Focus on me. There doesn't need to be anything else.
Jayce would scrunch his eyebrows together and start saying something like that's not the point, and by the time he’d finished, his tear tracks would have dried and his breathing had evened out.
Viktor liked it. He liked being Jayce’s grounding force, at the time because it cemented his place by his side and in the city, and later because he got a kind of cruel satisfaction at watching the Defender struggle to reign himself in without Viktor there to help. He’d come at the Herald half-drunk and sick and sobbing, yelling out nonsensical threats when he could take in enough air to form words.
The Herald might have been outwardly above it all, looking down at his rival in disgust and turning his back, allowing the Defender the grace to pretend such fits never occurred, but the Viktor inside him, the selfish and possessive animal he never managed to fully euthanize, would preen.
Look what he becomes without me, it would whisper, see how badly he needs me?
The Herald had taken these moments as proof – or maybe he had just desperately and helplessly hoped – that Jayce’s need for him would one day manifest in Jayce actually choosing him. One day the Defender would take off the breastplate and put down the hammer and catch the conveyor down to Zaun to knock on Viktor’s door and Viktor could wipe his tears and tell him to focus on me. And he would.
He did not account for the fact that a world in which Jayce needed him but did not have him could result in a world without Jayce. Was it really so difficult to abandon Piltover, to put his own needs above the wishes of those in power for once? Viktor had done it easily, like amputating an infected limb. He had surgically removed himself from every layer of Piltovan life and rebuilt himself a version fit for Zaun. Why could Jayce not do the same?
But he hadn’t excised the infection, he knows now. It lingered under his skin in the shape of a gap-toothed smile and an unrestrained laugh. Old injuries reopened and stinking with pus, a scorbutic phantom limb.
The Machine Herald curls in on himself, arms folded around his metal body to keep himself from falling apart, a futile attempt to hold onto a ghost. Viktor cries for the first time in over three decades, harder than he had then, nearly violent. He rocks back and forth in his chair and screams into the empty air of the workshop and tosses his mask at the far wall. His voice breaks on a sob, and he finally rests his bare face in his hands, the metal cool on his hot skin.
On Viktor’s twenty-ninth birthday, a Piltovan doctor with a flat face met his eyes with a kind of detached apathy and told him that he had, at most, two years left to live.
Viktor remembers the sensations more than the moment itself. The scratch of the hospital gown against his bare chest, the ache of his lungs and the then-familiar rattle of his breath, the sting of the raw and peeling skin around his mouth and nose from repeatedly being sick. The way the fluorescent lights bore down on the doctor’s face unflatteringly, and Viktor’s uncharacteristic and pointless insecurity that he must look even worse, all sallow skin and jutting bones.
He asked the doctor if there was anything that could be done. He did not expect an affirmative answer and he did not receive one. He retrieved his clothes and cane and thanked the doctor for their help. Then he went home.
Viktor did not cry in the hospital, nor in the grey and windy exterior he stepped out into. He did not cry on the tram, even though there were no available seats and his leg shot bursts of pain through his thigh and spine with each tilt and jolt of the carriage. It was only when Viktor turned his key in his lock, opening his door to the dark and stale air of his apartment, that tears began to burn in his eyes.
Not despair, not even anger. Just years of built-up frustration. Why him? Why now? What would be left to remember him by if he died today? A series of pointless and forgettable papers that would only stay relevant for, at most, another decade? A construct he hasn’t spoken to in months that no one believes he was clever enough to create? A series of colleagues who hate him? One, single friend who couldn’t even have the decency to defend Viktor the only time he’d ever asked for it?
A city he promised to raise out of the muck left abandoned to be swallowed by the sea. No one alive in Zaun would even remember his name, save for a handful of professors and old classmates from his undergraduate. Blitzcrank, he supposed, though it was less of a balm than it should’ve been. Who cared if Blitzcrank could recognize their creator’s name, if no one in Piltover would?
Viktor had been sure his entire life that he was meant for something greater, that he deserved more than the hand he was dealt. His conviction was only bolstered when Stanwick singled him out and funded his transfer to the Academy.
A ruse in the end, of course. His greedy eyes set on Viktor’s potential not as a scientist, but as a mark. He must have known, even then, that when push came to shove, no one would ever believe Viktor’s word over his. And he had been right.
Viktor sat in the dark of his apartment and cried silently. He did not yell. He did not throw his dishes on the floor or hit the wall until his knuckles bled. He kept his body as still as possible and let bitter tears run down his face, clenching his fists in his lap as he held back his coughs. He imagined what it would be like to run as far as he could and feel his lungs burn from something other than the illness ravaging them, for his thighs to ache because of something he’d chosen to do rather than simple weakness. He thought of Jayce lifting a hammer above his head in the forge and bringing it down, over and over, and imagined doing the same. He could practically hear the sound of the hammer coming down repeatedly on the anvil.
He could hear it, in fact. Or– no, not the sharp clang of metal on metal. Something duller. Viktor pulled his sleeve across his face, wiping the tears from his eyes and rising shakily to his feet. A knock at his door, he thought, squinting through the dark of his hallway. It took a moment for his mind to catch up with him, and then he was clamoring for his cane and limping towards the entrance. He tried to remember if he was expecting anyone. He’d taken the day off work– a small concession, a birthday gift to himself, and an allowance in case his appointment with the doctor went badly. Which it had.
Not Heimerdinger then, here to poke and prod at Viktor’s absence and remind him that punctuality is the first step towards success! Blitzcrank, maybe? Viktor’s heart rose in his throat. He hadn’t spoken to the construct since they parted ways in the make-shift med-tent at the edge of the chem spill. He had been selfish, after, his ego wounded first by his failure to save more lives at the spill, then by Stanwick’s proclamation and Jayce’s complicit silence. He should have reached out to the construct, should have inquired as to if Stanwick’s false assertion, though it had not attracted much publicity outside academic circles, had hindered their work in Zaun in any way. Should have been there to smooth any difficulties Blitzcrank may have had adjusting to independence.
But perhaps they had realized that Viktor was unable to make that first step, and had decided to bridge the gap on their own. Perhaps they were here to invite Viktor back to Zaun, and really, what did he have holding him back from returning now? It was not as though his lungs could get worse, and it would be best to have a being constructed specifically for medical care on hand as he deteriorated anyway. Maybe he could finally do something real, install those air purifiers he used to talk about, or perfect the techmaturgical experiments on human flesh that failed so blatantly during the spill. He had more experience now, could put what he learned from those failures to use–
It was not Blitzcrank that Viktor opened the door to. He paused in his tracks, reschooling his expression into something more neutral, pulling away from the bright light of the hallway and back into the darkness of his apartment.
Jayce held up a bottle of wine with a grimace, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. Viktor noted the dark bags under his eyes, the nails chewed to the quick and the scabbed and picked-raw skin around them.
“Happy birthday, V.”
Naph comes downstairs an indeterminate amount of time after Viktor returns home. He hasn’t been keeping track – once his tears ran out, he’d resigned himself to sitting silently and staring at the far wall, letting out a wail every now and then, or getting to his feet to violently kick the corner of a desk when the mood struck, before slumping back down and resuming his vigil.
Naph lets out an audible breath when he sees him, moving around Viktor’s stationary body to fetch a dented pot from the cupboard and a can of sweetmilk from the pantry. Viktor doesn’t react as Naph places the pot on the stovetop, pulling the tab on the can and letting the gelatinous cylinder of its contents fall into the pot. The burner ignites with a few dull clicks and the noxious smell of gas is quickly overtaken by the cloying scent of sweetmilk as the gelatin breaks down and the sweetmilk begins to melt into a liquid.
Sweetmilk isn’t sweet on its own, nor is it really milk. This is something Viktor was surprised to have to explain to Jayce, under the impression that even Piltovans indulged themselves in the confection. Jayce had taken one sip, urged on by Viktor to just try it, and he had made a face so exaggeratedly pulled that Viktor had nearly fallen over laughing.
He’d described the texture as powdered snail slime and the taste as nonexistent but a bit sour, like it’s gone bad.
It is not an inaccurate description. Sweetmilk comes in two primary forms: a powder that can be dissolved with warm water, and a canned, gelatinous substance that must be heated until it liquifies. Both are shelf-stable, produced not from any dairy-producing mammal but a mix of dehydrated fungus and likely some undisclosed animal by-products. Viktor has always preferred the canned sweetmilk, though perhaps only because water, especially warm, was so sparse in his childhood home.
In Piltover, when he felt particularly nostalgic or simply wanted to bother Jayce, he would mix the powder in with the boiled sweetmilk from a can, which created a mixture thick enough to whip and eat with a spoon. He would mix in a half-teaspoon of cinnamon, two generous spoonfuls of sugar, and up to three star anise pods. It was an indulgence that he can no longer afford.
When Naph makes him a cup now, he spares a larger than normal pinch of sugar and a single star anise. A pod can be reused multiple times, so Viktor has taken to rinsing his mugs over a strainer and collecting the small pods before drying them under a heat lamp to be reused. They lose flavor over time, and honestly don’t cost that much, but Viktor has always been frugal– or at least, he has been ever since he returned to Zaun after his expulsion from the Academy. Building everything around driving a wedge between then-and-now, before-and-after.
Naph forces the mug into his hands and takes a seat opposite him. He has his own cup, and takes a sip from it as he watches Viktor. Viktor is struck suddenly by just how old Naph has gotten, how much time has passed since he took the boy in. He feels, often, as though he is living in a sort of stasis. Zaun has not gained a real foothold in the endless fight against Piltover and Viktor’s vision of an evolved humanity has yet to come to pass. Each day starts and ends the same, with Viktor focused on plots that go nowhere and make no difference, not in the grand scheme of things.
He was so sure, once, that he was going to change the world. Now Naph is older than Viktor was when he found him, has grown into a man before Viktor’s eyes, and Viktor has stayed stubbornly the same. All those years of accusing Jayce – not falsely – of letting his mind grow rigid, but what has Viktor been doing? Slaving over the same ideas, the same prototypes, sure that this next innovation will be the one that changes everything. Now Jayce is dead, and Naph is a man, and Viktor is exactly as he has always been.
“How did the funeral go?” Naph asks, when it is clear that Viktor will not speak first.
Viktor watches his star anise wink out at him from inside his mug.
“They cremated him.”
That's all he can say. He can see now with clear eyes that Naph knew, or suspected, that Jayce was dead all along. He wants to berate the boy for not stepping in, for not forcing Viktor to confront the truth when there was still a chance to bring Jayce back, but it is pointless. What use is there in arguing over whether or not Viktor would’ve believed him, not to mention that, as far as Naph knows, Jayce and Viktor have always been enemies. It’s an odd pang in what remains of his heart, to realize that Jayce was his enemy for so much longer than he was his friend
Naph nods, as if this desecration is unsurprising.
“His daughter will be taking his place as the Defender,” Viktor continues, and this at least seems to surprise Naph.
“Amaranthine?” He asks. “But why? What’s the point– I mean, it’s over now, isn’t it? Can’t she just…” He trails off, then sighs. “No, I guess not. Okay.”
Viktor just hums in response. He rotates his mug in his hands, mimics the motions of breathing in the heavy steam. Nostalgia, maybe, for his old steam therapy, for the quick relief it would bring him. Nothing is so easy anymore. For the first time in years, he finds it difficult to draw breath, a phantom obstruction lodged in his chest.
“I think,” he says to Naph, “that the emotion suppressants do not work.”
Amaranthine dresses for the day with intention. That’s the best way to put it. She doesn’t want to look like a clone of her father, it would be ill-fitting and everyone would know, but she needs to evoke him, needs people to look at her and see him.
It’s lucky, maybe, that Jayce had such a distinct sense of style. His silhouette is easy to mimic with a long coat, a breastplate, and sturdy boots. It’s the color that’s the real problem – Amaranthine is not contracted under Clan Giopara the way Jayce was, and she doesn’t want to be. But because Ximena was never formally or legally inducted into House Talis, Jayce wasn’t either, and Amaranthine has no lost love for that half of what could be called her family.
So she cannot wear the vibrant reds of Clan Giopara, nor the cool jewel-tones and browns of House Talis. She cannot wear green, because it is too Zaunite, and black will be too mournful, gold too jubilant.
Despite being the daughter of one of Piltover’s most well-known and well-loved figures, she is as nameless as a Zaunite. Though she had no house before Jayce took her in, she did have a name that she’d discarded with almost a manic glee at the first opportunity that presented itself. She does not recall her mother’s maiden name. She writes Ximena’s when she signs her letters, though its legality is shaky at best.
Reginald Ferros had stopped her after the funeral. Asked her, though the words seemed forced through his teeth, if she had put any consideration into renewing her father’s contract with Clan Ferros. She’d turned him down firmly but politely, using her lack of experience in the blacksmithing and engineering side of her father’s ventures as a justification. Reggie nodded as though disappointed, then pulled her into a quick hug.
“Good,” he’d whispered into her hair. “Don’t let them get you too.”
He’d smelled like the air after a thunderstorm.
She knows his contract with the Ferros’ is what Jayce’s had once been to the Giopara’s. A name for a job. A sort of personhood stripped so they can mold you into the face of a clan, covering up whatever came before. Worse, maybe, than Jayce’s had been. At least Jayce could be bought, contracted out to other clans for work and given a loose enough leash to pursue his passions. Ever since Albus Ferros passed, Reggie has been stuck balancing the books and tending to the needs of Camille Ferros, a fate that nothing short of a miracle will allow him escape.
White then, she decides. A blank slate. A brighter tomorrow yet to be written, if she is looking at it optimistically. And if she isn't, she remembers learning that in some parts of Ionia, they wear white while in mourning, associate the color with death rather than life. Bloodless skin, pale bone.
Amaranthine was not the one to find Jayce, that was his housekeeper’s misfortune, but she was called in to identify the body. A symbolic gesture – anyone in the city could’ve recognized Jayce. She remembers the enforcer pulling back the white sheet, remembers her childish initial thought: that Jayce simply looked as though he was sleeping. That maybe this was all a mistake, and he’d wake up soon.
The pallor of his face though, the complete stillness of his body, gave it away. Besides, he hadn’t looked so peaceful when they found him. They’d cleaned him up for her, she knows. Wiped the vomit off his chin and forced his eyes closed.
Putting on a performance even in death. It’s part of why she was so grateful to find out Jayce had requested to be cremated. At least that was honest. They didn’t let her watch that part, but after the body had finished burning and the remaining ashes had been collected, a man with calloused hands pressed the urn into Amaranthine’s own, and she swore she could still feel the heat through the bronze.
She's supposed to meet Caitlyn before the press conference today. The least she can do, really, considering the bomb she dropped at the funeral, and the fact that the conference is technically being held on Kiramman property. She’d alerted a small number of the press beforehand, but only alluded to the nature of her announcement. She hadn’t told anyone what she planned to do before she’d done it. A precaution, and a reasonable one. Someone would’ve put a stop to it. She’s honestly surprised no one has yet, although the small but growing pile of unopened letters from various members of Piltover’s highest clans tells her they may still be trying.
She gives herself one last look-over in the mirror. Fluffs her hair, cut in a chic, modern style so unlike her childhood commitment to ringlets and pigtails. It's slicked back off her forehead, of course, but she lets the rest of it curl gently against the back of her neck. She takes a deep breath and meets her own eyes in the mirror.
You're the Defender of Tomorrow, she thinks at her reflection.
Such an affirmation is ineffective in quelling her feelings of inadequacy. It doesn't even feel as though she's playing dress-up or putting on a costume – it just feels like a bald-faced lie. She tries to school her expression into something more stern, squints her eyes and clenches her jaw to try and hide the fact that it never squared out like Jayce's. A perpetual babyface, nearly in her middle age and still just a little girl trying to imitate the motions of adulthood.
It doesn't have to fool me, she thinks, just everyone else.
“Okay,” she says aloud, voice echoing through the empty room, “I am the Defender of Tomorrow.”
The proclamation falls flat, the silence of the apartment oppressive once her voice fades. Amaranthine huffs, grabs her keys from a nearby dish, and walks out the door.
Blitzcrank is alerted to their father's presence by a scream.
This is not an uncommon reaction. While the citizens of Zaun were initially repulsed by Blitzcrank, they have, over the years, become a familiar sight. In contrast, their father stays cooped up in his workshop, and no matter their efforts to dispel the rumours surrounding his work, the gossip persists.
Blitzcrank places a hand on the shoulder of the shouting girl, feels her flinch and then relax under their touch.
She looks up at them, and they tilt their head, gesturing for her to return to her friends and leave them to deal with the Herald. The girl scampers off, and Blitzcrank is already dreading the inevitable series of tall tales that will ignite from this event.
Ever since Naph grew old enough to haggle for parts alone, Father has been seen less and less in the streets of Zaun, only appearing when he stages a particularly public stunt against the Defender. Even then, from what Blitzcrank hears, those are mostly contained to Piltover.
The Machine Herald is more of a ghost story than ever, so to see him outside, in broad daylight no less (or what can be referred to as daylight this deep in the fissures – it is day, at least, and there is some form of light) is a surprise.
Blitzcrank can guess as to why he chose now to appear.
“Father,” they say.
The Machine Herald inclines his head and gestures for them to follow him down a nearby alley, where he clasps his hands together and stays silent for a moment, as if taking them in.
“Blitzcrank,” he says, “you have done good work here.”
Blitzcrank stiffens imperceptibly. The Hospital, the locals call it. An ill-fitting name. It is a folding stand run by a man who Blitzcrank suspects is some sort of crook, although what sort of profit could be made from such a venture is a mystery to them.
From the hours of 09:00 to 22:00, every day that they are able, the stand accepts patients who queue around the block for a handful of whatever pills or tinctures the various volunteers have been able to scrounge up. Blitzcrank helps when there are no more pressing emergencies or injuries for them to attend to. A day of checking temperatures and alleviating withdrawal symptoms is what they consider their break from emergency amputations and fishing dead bodies out from underneath factory wreckage.
It is good work, in a manner of speaking. Blitzcrank is well aware, however, of how their father views ventures such as harm reduction. They cannot follow his eyes from behind his mask, but they are sure he is looking at the growing queue of addicts and other unfortunates with the kind of disdain that Blitzcrank, cruelly, thinks only a man educated in Piltover can carry.
Like a Piltovan, their father sees the population that burrows into the deepest layer of the fissures with a kind of detached frustration at their inadequacy. Unlike a Piltovan, Father does not resent their inability to work or contribute to some larger profit-driven idea of society, but instead their unwillingness to have their bodies and minds repurposed in his army of machines.
“It is not as though they are happy,” he'd told Blitzcrank once, many years ago, as if he would be doing them a favour. “I am not asking for much – in fact, I am asking for nothing at all! I am offering to provide a service, to grant them escape from their broken bodies and minds, to find fulfillment in our city's collective betterment!”
This had been before Father had perfected his methods – though perhaps he still has not. Regardless, the rate of failure was high then, and Blitzcrank was aware, in the back of their still-developing mind, that what their father really wanted was a mass of willing subjects for him to experiment on, even if he did not see it that way.
He had not pulled people out of their homes in the night, like the stories say, but he has never been opposed to a bit of clever manipulation.
“Thank you,” Blitzcrank says instead. Then, “Why are you here, Father?”
They want to see whether he will say it outright, or if he will obfuscate as he has always done when the subject of the Defender arises.
“Is a man not allowed to pay a visit to his greatest creation?” The Herald asks with an almost teasing tone. Perhaps he doesn't intend it, but it feels like a mockery of the closeness they once shared. In all his years living in the sump-level, Blitzcrank's father has never once visited.
“I thought that was yourself.”
The Herald clicks his tongue as if to say, semantics. Blitzcrank stays silent, allowing the gulf between them to expand.
“Did you hear?” The Herald finally asks. He shrinks in on himself slightly.
“Yes.”
Blitzcrank doesn't elaborate past that. What is there to say? Sorry for your loss? It’s absurd. The Herald has attempted to kill the Defender more times than they can count. When the news of the Defender's passing finally reached the lowest levels of the fissures, Blitzcrank was half-waiting for the Defender to rise from the dead, a mechanical heart beating in his chest along with a sudden, inexplicable passion for defending Zaun and converting others to his mechanical rapture.
“He was cremated,” the Herald spits, and– Well, that answers that question.
“Ah.”
The silence descends again. Now that Blitzcrank is aware of where their father's mind rests, they cannot quite piece together what he is here for. They had expected an attempted recruitment in Jayce's resurrection, appeals to progress, political gain and, finally, when none of that succeeded, promises of being a family again.
Blitzcrank does not consider Jayce their father. As far as they are aware, Jayce provided nothing more than a cursory peer over their early schematics, and the lease for the apartment in which they were built. Despite his possessiveness, Father has always seen it differently.
Maybe it is because their creation, a part of their existence Blitzcrank was not themself privy to, was a collaborative experience in the sense that everything Jayce and Viktor did in those years was collaborative. Any project, even if only one of them worked on it and only one of their names was published on the paper, was seen by them as something they had done together. Blitzcrank supposes it is because they lived such intertwined lives that they credited each other with sparking inspiration and increasing productivity and quality, even for independent work.
So, Blitzcrank is Viktor's, in the Herald's mind, but even after all these years, anything that is Viktor's is, in some odd, convoluted sense, also Jayce's.
It is why the Defender’s silence at the trial offended him so much, Blitzcrank thinks. Father saw it as a mutual robbery, a slight against them both that Jayce was obligated to deflect, both as Viktor's friend and his collaborator.
Blitzcrank, to their father's immense chagrin, has never much cared. They know who created them, do they not? Stanwick's action impeded Viktor's career and life's trajectory, not their own. They are open about their origin to anyone who asks. They find Stanwick Padidly's actions distasteful and problematic, especially in an academic context, but they’ve never met the man. It isn't personal to them the way it is to Viktor, despite the entire situation being ostensibly centered around them.
Because of the confused trial and Stanwick's inability to provide any actual insight on Blitzcrank's mechanisms afterwards, Blitzcrank's creation and ongoing existence lingers in a liminal space of proven but unreplicatable. This suits them well enough. They don't relish the idea of being patented like a valve or filtration device.
“Why are you here, Father?” They ask again, when it becomes clear that the Herald will not initiate.
“Have you spoken to Naph recently?”
Blitzcrank tilts their head to the side. “No, not for a few months. Is he unwell?”
The Herald shakes his head. “No, no, he is fine. I was simply… I wonder sometimes, you know, about how the two of you get along. I know that I have not been the most… present in your life.”
“I do not resent Naph for your role in his development,” Blitzcrank says, confused. Their father has not come all the way here for reassurance on his parenting skills, surely?
“No, you wouldn't. You always were a better person than me.”
True, perhaps, but an admission that worries Blitzcrank. “Are you alright, Father?”
“His daughter– Did you ever meet her? Amaranthine, her name was. Is.” A complete non sequitur. Either Blitzcrank needs to reboot their language comprehension systems, or their father is following a line of thought completely alien to them.
“I have not,” Blitzcrank says. They are aware, vaguely, that the Defender has – had – a daughter. They never met her however, cannot even picture her.
“She and Naph are nearly the same age, I think,” the Herald continues as if Blitzcrank hadn’t even spoken. “Give or take a year. He took her in the same year I did Naph, too. Only a few months before. A funny coincidence. Sometimes I wonder…” He trails off.
“You have been wondering about quite a lot lately,” Blitzcrank gently probes. They are still lost as to the direction this conversation is headed.
“I suppose I have.” A pause. “You know that I am proud of you, don't you, Blitzcrank? I know that I have not come to visit you as of late, but I do not want you to think it is because I… resent your independence. You grew up into something wonderful, even if I was not there to, eh, nudge you along.”
Blitzcrank decides that as soon as this conversation is over, they will perform a full-system evaluation. Nothing their father says seems to connect in any way to his previous musings. His train of thought weaves and wanders in a way Blitzcrank has never known it to, used to blunt, if hyperbolic, language that follows a clear, straight line of logic.
He sounds now like an old man, delirious and nostalgic, lingering on past choices with a wistful air of what could have been that Blitzcrank has never known his father to possess. He has always been a man laser-focused on the future.
“Are you sure you are well, Father?” They ask, and the Herald lets out a low, vibrating laugh.
“I do not wish to trouble you with my regrets, if they could be referred to as such, Blitzcrank, though I appreciate the concern. No, I simply wanted to see you. I have… missed you, I think.”
“You think.”
“Ah, twist my arm!” The Herald performs a sort of charade of his third arm reaching out and violently yanking at his left, as if to pull it loose from its socket. It makes the Herald chuckle to himself, amused by his own joke. “Yes, I missed you. You always were our greatest creation. I wonder if you get it from– but, like you said, I have done too much wondering as of late.”
Blitzcrank tilts their head, attempts to piece this statement together. They push down the bitter feeling that often arises when their father refers to them as his. It isn't the time.
It is moments of levity like this where Blitzcrank resents their father most. When he is distant and cold it is easy to justify their distance and remind themselves as to why they rejected his ideology. When he jokes, when he tells Blitzcrank things like he misses them, all it does is remind Blitzcrank of the, for lack of a better term, childhood they never received. A father too bitter and possessive to consider his creation their own person. Everything Blitzcrank did, taken as either a personal victory or failure.
They have never resented Naph for his place as the Herald's apprentice and ward, for the comparatively gentle and judgement-free hand Viktor reared him with, but sometimes they are jealous. For all that the Herald preaches the superiority of metal, his subconscious leniency towards his child of flesh always painted a clear picture of a man deeply unaware of his own biases.
Blitzcrank has had time to accept this view of their father, slowly unraveling themself from each aspect of the Machine Herald's work along with it. They wonder if this odd behavior now is their father realizing, too, just how repressed he is and has always been.
“It was nice of you to visit,” they say. An olive branch.
The Herald reaches out and clasps his hands around one of Blitzcrank's. “Thank you,” he says, then turns and disappears into the smog of the alleyway. Blitzcrank's internal servos hum as they process the conversation, storing it to their memory banks to more closely examine later.
Then they turn and walk back towards the hospital. There are still many hours of work to do, and too many people who need their help.
Caitlyn stands behind Amaranthine as the cameras flash and reporters shove each other out of the way to ask their questions. Her mouth is pulled tight, but she keeps her expression as neutral as possible. Gods know she wants to give as little ammunition as possible to these vultures.
Amaranthine explained the plan to her before the conference. Caitlyn doesn't approve, but Amaranthine is a grown woman and, selfishly, Caitlyn doesn't want to lose any more time with her niece than she already has. She can practically hear the accusation in Vi’s voice.
So you'll let her feed herself into the same meat grinder that killed her father, then?
She hadn't said that, not exactly, but her wife's thoughts on the matter had been made very clear after the funeral. Caitlyn's implicit approval – standing behind Amaranthine on the makeshift stage – will surely garner her an earful when she returns home.
Ultimately, she knows Vi will understand. Family has always been important to her, and she's missed Ama as much as Caitlyn has.
So far, Amaranthine has conducted herself with an uncharacteristic degree of grace. She doesn’t smile like Jayce would, but her somber air seems to win over the crowd. It makes them take her seriously, recognize her as a genuine force that could contend against a threat as feared as the Machine Herald. She answers questions directly, sprinkling in just enough patriotism and daughterly duty to appease the shrewder members of the crowd. Her initial speech had been short and to the point. She holds her back straight and her shoulders high.
And of course, she carries his hammer. The sight of the thing makes Caitlyn sick. She itches to melt it down and throw the gem that powers it into the bottom of the ocean.
Amaranthine carries it with the familiarity and grace of a third limb. When a reporter in the crowd shouts out at her to pose for a photo, she lifts it over her shoulder with stares down the barrel of the camera, her brown eyes steely and certain.
It certainly looks impressive, and the crowd eats it up. Caitlyn is sure she would too, if she wasn't aware of just how light the hammer is when powered up. Jayce could barely hold it himself when it was off, and Amaranthine carries none of his well defined muscle, though she hides that fact well under layers of expensive white fabric.
When Caitlyn's father died, only a few months after her mother (of grief, the doctors said), his body was wrapped in white. This is what Amaranthine reminds her of now. A funeral shroud. She cannot shake the feeling that by choosing this path, her niece is already dead and lost to her, a corpse posed for the cameras.
She clenches her fists at her sides and tries to ignore the dread that she lately feels unable to escape.
Jayce dying shook something in her, beyond the predictable grief. They're getting old, their generation of heroes or figureheads or whatever you want to call them. Jayce first – who next? Vi? Her? The coping mechanisms, denial and substance abuse and reassurances of greater good, that carried them through their youth prove ineffective in the face of the inevitable onslaught of time. There's only so long someone can manage the contradiction, and Jayce wasn't raised to be a showpony like she was, nor was his skin ever as thick as Vi's.
And now Amaranthine will take his place, and all Caitlyn can see is the little girl who used to sit in her lap and ask her to braid her hair. Would she be better off if Jayce had never taken her in? Surely they could've found someone else – a family better suited to raising a daughter.
But Caitlyn is selfish, and she has so little family left. Maybe Amaranthine would be better off with someone else, but she doesn't have anyone else. Just Caitlyn and Vi now, and it's not as though they're any less dysfunctional than Jayce was, just better at hiding it from the public.
She and Vi never had children. Ill-suited to it, anyone who knew them would agree. Caitlyn's turbulent relationship with her mother and Vi's with her sister – no, they would not have made good parents. The Kiramman name will die with her, a fact that Caitlyn has made peace with.
There is a good chance that even if they had taken Amaranthine from Jayce (something they never seriously considered, but she had imagined it, in moments of acute frustration with Jayce’s behavior) she would have ended up even worse off than she is now.
Vi would have always seen Powder in her, an impossible burden that would’ve likely weighed heavily on a young girl. On the opposite end of neurosis, Caitlyn fears that she would have begun to see her mother in herself. At least Jayce always loved Amaranthine as herself, allowing her to pursue a series of eclectic and short-lived hobbies that he had no experience or interest in.
It's why it makes no sense – that Jayce would leave his role as Defender to her after his death. He never even wanted it for himself. For a man obsessed with his legacy, he was always good about distancing those expectations from his daughter's own life, allowing her to follow her own passions rather than impose his.
Though, Caitlyn thinks, he wasn't so interested in that particular legacy by the end. Maybe it was just the alcoholism and repeated head injuries that led to chronic migraines, brought on when exposed to bright lights like one would see in the flash of a camera or the front of a stage, but Jayce had reduced his public appearances significantly in the past few years. Conversely, his publication rate dropped too, as if he had stopped working entirely.
Now, Caitlyn can see that it was worse than she ever thought. She had hoped it was his way of quietly retiring, pulling himself out from the limelight slowly and methodically. It turns out that he was just drinking himself to death, alone in that big empty house that he hated.
She was a bad sister. The least she can do is be a present aunt. When asked to comment, she reaffirms Amaranthine's right to the title and legacy, even as she feels it poised like a sword against her little girl's neck.
In the wake of his failure to alchemize an emotion suppressant, the Machine Herald has had a breakthrough. It does not help his own issues, he is still woefully feeling more so than usual. It is as though now that he recognizes the placebo for what it was, his emotions have risen to the forefront in a way they haven't since he was a young man, impossible to ignore and always clawing for attention.
Still, there are benefits. Now that he can recognize them for what they are, the Herald can more easily piece apart what is foolish sentimentality and what thoughts are still driven by logic. It helps keep his actions separate from the storm that rages underneath his mask, a distance he was not granted in his denial.
So he cannot yet isolate emotion as a whole – but individual feelings and the physical sensations associated with them? This is something he mastered years ago. True, his goal then was always to remove the emotion – to cut it out – and he achieved this to, at most, limited success. But knowing what he does now – what if the key to control is inducing emotion in a subject?
He has tried and failed for years to evolve humanity beyond their emotions. His ultimate goal has not changed. Just– sometimes one must take a detour in order to reach their destination. It is not as though he has a time limit on what is ultimately inevitable. The glorious evolution will always come about, one way or another, and the Machine Herald will be there to help along, no matter how twisting or circuitous the path there.
So, yes, his previous attempts to excise sentimentality have failed. Brain hemorrhages, dizzying confusion, inability or unwillingness to follow instructions; the list is endless, not to mention the Herald’s own lackluster experience with his emotion suppressant implant.
If he returns to those initial plans, the diving suits that started it all, he can see the cracks in the premise. Perhaps he would have been able to induce a deeper understanding of logic and rationality in the workers, could even make them understand that the hallucinations they saw were merely reflections of their own fear and stress, but all this effort would be for nothing without a goal to aim them towards. Someone can understand something, follow each point along the graph with full comprehension, and still not take the reasonable step forward. Viktor knows this now, has personal experience with the phenomenon. Jayce is ashes because of his failure.
His death will not be in vain.
Cold logic on its own is not enough, not if he is unable to fully remove every last trace of human emotion, but what if he added something along with it? A dash of joy, adrenaline, serotonin, whatever– just enough to make them want to follow instructions, to follow the logical path forward and spare themselves from the folly of human error.
The Herald can admit he has rarely experimented with ‘positive’ emotions, focused more on sensations like fear and despair, but the process isn't all that different.
The subject on his table groans in pain, and the Herald ignores him.
His third arm is steady and precise as it splits and cauterizes neural pathways and nerve endings, severing useless frivolities and tying new connections.
The man facedown on the table is one of the cultists from the Promenade level – a willing subject once he heard the Herald's pitch. Increasing the fervour of his devotion, a techmaturgical form of ecclesiastical ecstasy. It is a jargon-filled pile of sentimental nonsense, exactly the kind that the Herald detests, but it is also, in certain technical terms, true.
The subject's skull is sawed open symmetrically, the bone cut along a line reaching from the crown of his head, snaking behind his ears, and culminating in a straight line between them, before being removed and discarded for easy access to the brain. The Herald has already prepared a replacement for the bone. Titanium, with circular ports for insertions of chemtech tubing. He's lucky the cultists keep their hair cropped so short.
The subject groans again, his face squished against the cold metal of the operating table. He is bare from the waist up, his position on his stomach obscuring a particularly unfortunate chest tattoo. His back is broad and tan from his home up in the relatively clear air of the first assemblage. The Herald marvels at how deep even the disparity within Zaun runs.
He shushes the subject, patting one of his thick arms consolingly and making a face when he notices the bloody handprint he leaves behind. Ah, well.
“Almost done,” the Herald says, which is blatantly untrue, but he has been told by Naph to work on his bedside manner, and a little white lie never hurt anybody.
His third arm burns through a thin connection of nerves that leaves the man's body slumping forward on the table, boneless and pliant. He even stops his groaning.
“There you go,” the Herald says, almost sweetly. He focuses in and cauterizes the neural pathways he needs to, using his third arm as a laser while he deftly threads a near-microscopically thin wire through the grey matter.
A shudder passes through the man's body. He is sweating heavily, beading on his back and collecting on the table underneath him. The Herald hopes he isn't breathing it in. He coos softly, the sound reverberating in his chest like a motor.
“Good, good,” he says, soldering the wire in place. He readjusts his goggles. “Naph, pass me the curved needle, please.”
He reaches out a hand blindly and feels the blunt end of the needle pressed into it. He hums in thanks. Naph has been quiet throughout this operation, but the Herald supposes he must have a lot on his mind after finding him in such a state after the funeral. He hopes his renewed dedication reassures his apprentice that such fits are not something he should expect or grow accustomed to. He's almost embarrassed.
Nearly an hour later, he finishes securing the subject's new cranium. It connects with five smooth clasps across the forehead, for ease of access in case the Herald ever has to conduct maintenance or reevaluate his work. He traces his fingers across the man's closed eyes, wiping blood from his forehead with an antiseptic cloth.
He's uglier, from the front, but if the Herald unfocuses his eyes a bit– yes, it is fine work. He feels a faint sense of pride, like a rainfall after a drought. This is where he is meant to be. This is what he is meant to be doing.
“When will he wake up?”
Naph's voice is cold and even. Pride, yes. That is what Viktor is feeling.
“Soon,” the Herald reassures him. “Within the day, I would think.”
Naph hums in response.
“More invasive than an injection,” he says.
“More effective too.”
Silence. The Machine Herald turns around. Naph is fiddling with his removed gloves, staring at him. He looks strikingly like he did when he first ventured into the Herald’s home so many years ago. That brave little boy.
“Put those in the biohazard bin,” he says, gesturing to the gloves. Naph complies, his eyes never leaving the Herald’s.
Ah, Viktor thinks, somewhere in the back of his mind, somewhere that he isn’t quite able to reach right now, but to be brave, one must first have something to be afraid of.
A woman with shaved hair and a cybernetic jaw tips Amaranthine off. She says that one of her fellows is missing, tells her that the Machine Herald has been approaching members of the church looking for volunteers.
At first, Amaranthine thinks it's a trap. Why would one of the Herald’s cultists come to her for help?
But the woman insists. Says she believes in the mission, still, but has begun to lose faith in the Herald as their chosen messiah as the years came and went and his promised evolutions never came to fruition.
She says the man is her brother. Blood, she emphasizes, not just in the religious sense. She describes him as a little over 180 centimeters, with dark hair and eyes, and a strong frame from his work as a bricklayer.
He built some of our best temples, she tells Amaranthine with pride. Amaranthine wants to tell her to go fuck herself.
She tells her that she'll find her brother.
She takes the woman's shaking hands in her own and reassures her that the promised tomorrow she is defending is for both cities. The woman doesn't seem to believe her, which is okay, because neither does Amaranthine. She keeps her expression steady and sure despite her doubts – lately she's begun seeing the flash of the camera out of the corner of her eye, and a bead of sweat drips down the back of her neck.
She takes the conveyor down to Zaun. The streets neighboring Emberflit are empty. She wonders if it's always been this way – if the Herald moved here because it was abandoned, or if the people who once inhabited these streets vacated it in response to his arrival.
Her footsteps are thunderous in the still silence of the night. It's okay. She isn't trying to be subtle. Her white coat practically glows surrounded by the grime of Zaun, and her hammer literally does, casting a sickly light over her surroundings. She keeps her expression steeled, her fingers flexing around the handle of the hammer.
Jayce knew where the Machine Herald lived. It was barely hidden, really. He’d written it down multiple times, like he was scared he’d forget, scrawled in the margins of journals and backs of post-it notes. Amaranthine doesn’t let herself wonder why the information was never made public, why enforcers never came pounding on the Herald’s door.
She knows the official story is that the Herald is constantly on the move, that he has no single residence or lab, and that with each one destroyed, two more grow back in its place. She knows that Jayce is the one who provided that report. She knows a lot about her father, now that he is dead.
Whatever reasons Jayce had for keeping the Machine Herald’s home a secret aren’t any of Amaranthine’s business. Her business is the woman who came to her pleading for her brother’s life, and the knowledge she has that could bring him home.
She hasn’t contacted any enforcers for backup. Not even Caitlyn knows where she is. This isn’t her official first outing, the way she had initially planned to launch her career as the Defender. She’s trying to think of it as a test run. If it goes well, then she can count it. If it doesn’t… Well, the street’s abandoned. There are no news crews here to follow her every move and critically examine each of her actions. Besides, the Herald killing or contorting one of his own cultists can’t do anything to hurt her cause, if the upper city even hears word of it at all.
The lights of the Herald’s house are the only illumination on the street. Flickering and honey-warm through the fogged windows, it almost looks friendly. An outsider might look in and imagine that it belongs to a family sitting down for dinner, never even considering the madman inside sharpening his bonesaws.
It is here, standing in front of the house on Emberflit, that Amaranthine falters. She was sure of herself as she descended towards her goal, and is still sure of her end point, the inevitable conflict with the Herald that must take place. But the inbetween, the stagnant moment she stands in now, vexes her.
Does she knock on his door? No, obviously. Does she shatter one of his windows with the cannon? Tempting, but it’s difficult to see inside, and what if she accidentally hits the woman’s brother by accident? She doesn’t know anything about the house’s internal arrangement, isn’t aware of any strategic weak points or structural faults that could give her the upperhand.
The door opening makes the decision for her. She whirls on it, cannon aimed and powering up, but the face it illuminates is not the Machine Herald’s; it’s only his apprentice. Amaranthine nearly doesn’t recognize him, hasn’t seen him in years. Naph, she thinks his name is. He looks older, which she supposes makes sense. He looks tired too, a pallor which makes him appear almost transparent despite his broad frame. Like Amaranthine could shoot him and he’d simply dissipate with the force, like fog in the wind.
“Oh,” he says, “it’s you.”
Amaranthine lowers the hammer slightly, suddenly feeling awfully childish in her long spotless coat and expensive leather boots that are barely broken in. Naph wears nothing but a pair of stiff work coveralls over a thin linen shirt. He’s not even wearing shoes.
“Is your–” she stumbles over her words, tongue heavy in her mouth. Dad, she almost says, but maybe that’s not right, and even if it is, it sounds so ridiculous, so babyish. Is your dad home? Like she’s asking for permission to play, or trying to sell girl scout cookies door to door.
“Where is the Machine Herald?” She asks instead, trying to force her expression into something grim and imposing.
Naph sends a glance back into the house, and it’s easy enough to figure out what he means. He doesn’t call for the Herald though, nor gesture for Amaranthine to follow him inside. He just stands in the doorway awkwardly, picking at his fingernails.
Fine. If he won’t call out the Herald, Amaranthine will.
“Machine Herald!” She yells out, voice bouncing off the hollow residences that line the street. “Return the man in your captivity and turn yourself in, and there will be no need for a fight!”
Naph just looks at her sadly. She tries not to let her hands shake as she raises the hammer.
A hand emerges from the darkness and settles on Naph’s shoulder, gently pulling him back into the house before stepping in front of him and into the light. The shape of the Machine Herald unfurrows like a spindly insect from a burrow, each sharp angle of him catching the dim light and reflecting it back in a way that makes him appear bigger than Amaranthine knows him to be. He is all smooth metal and hard edges, no hint of the flesh and blood man that Amaranthine knows at least parts of him still resemble.
“Defender,” he says, though even with the modulated voice, Amaranthine can tell he finds distaste in referring to her as such. “I see the rumors were true.”
“Where is– the man?” She asks, and wishes desperately that she could remember his name. She’s sure the sister told her – she must have – but Amaranthine wracks her brain and comes up empty. The sister’s name, too, seems to have abandoned her.
“I wasn’t aware Piltover’s council kept tabs on the private lives of the Church of the Glorious Evolution,” the Herald says, and Amaranthine counts it as a win. The Herald assumes she has council approval, council orders, and likely, council funding.
The council, of course, has no idea that she’s even down here, and certainly couldn’t give two shits about what the Machine Herald’s wayward congregation gets up to.
“His sister, actually,” Amaranthine says, and the Herald clicks his tongue.
“Family, I’ve found,” he says, keeping his glowing gaze locked on hers, “are often the ones holding us back.”
Amaranthine grits her teeth and refuses to let his words get to her. He’s trying to rile her up, force her to make the first move.
“Return him,” she says, “and turn yourself in.”
“Those aren’t the words of the Defender I know,” the Herald says, as if critiquing her form. “They sound more like the Piltover’s own Sheriff, back when– Well, I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember that unfortunate incident.” He’s speaking slowly, clearly making some point– though of what, Amaranthine has no idea. “She spoke through a megaphone, you could hear her a whole level down. Jinx, drop the bomb. Jinx, step away from the ledge. Just turn yourself in, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
His impression of Caitlyn’s accent is mocking, downright offensive, his tone condescending. He speaks as though his phony evolution has granted him wisdom beyond his age and thus a dissociation from the passage of human time. As if Amaranthine is too young to remember one of the most talked about events of the last year. As if hearing those words doesn’t send sinking dread through her body, a pit of lead forming in her stomach as the Herald speaks.
“She did, of course,” he continues. “Step off the ledge, that is. Dropped the bomb, too. So perhaps simply asking is enough to get what you want. It has been years since the Defender asked me to do anything other than die.”
He cocks his head to the side as if listening for something, then he nods. Amaranthine tenses, waiting for an attack, but it doesn’t come.
“I’ll be polite then, Defender, since you’ve been so kind as to make a request. You can take your missing man back to his poor sister.”
He waves a hand, almost dismissively, and Amaranthine is so put off and confused that she almost misses the shape shambling out from behind the Herald into the light of the doorway.
Tan skin, though it looks sickly and bloodless. Strong build, but pulsing with something unnatural. Dark hair– she wouldn’t know. The top of his skull has been replaced with what she first assumes is some sort of helmet, but upon closer inspection is clearly welded directly into the man’s head, the skin where it meets metal raw and inflamed. His head hangs low, his face obscured by shadow, and Amaranthine feels the hair rise on the back of her neck.
“What did you do to him?” She asks. She hopes her voice is steadier than it sounds in her head.
“It is a work in progress,” the Herald admits, as if sheepish, “and to be blunt, I am not sure if you have the expertise required to truly appreciate my accomplishments here.”
Amaranthine is not ignorant of the Herald’s methods. But it’s different seeing, as he puts it, a work in progress. When she first met Jayce and he saved her from the Herald’s automatons, she had known, logically, that they were once people, but visually there had been nothing to distinguish them from the mechanical toys she so adored.
There is no ignoring what the Herald has done to this man now. His eyes focus and unfocus deliriously. There’s a line of dried blood flaking off of his neck. His muscles tense underneath his skin as the Herald gently takes him by the shoulder, drawing him further into the light.
“I wish I’d known you were coming tonight,” the Herald says. “Your father always used to send me little messages ahead of time, clues and such, so I would be prepared. When I heard you coming up the street, I thought you were one of the little debt collectors Ms. Glasc likes to try and scare me with. If I had known it was you, I would have cleaned up somewhat.”
Amaranthine stands still, unsure whether to keep her hammer focused on the Herald, or to turn it towards the shambling man. For all his sinister posturing, he seems to be doing as she asked, and she doesn’t want to seem unsure or afraid in front of him.
“Luckily,” the Herald continues, “you caught me at a good time. Just in time to test my newest experiment.”
He snaps his fingers in front of the man’s eyes, drawing his attention.
“Javoc, was it?” He asks in a tone so unlike the one he has been using with Amaranthine, almost saccharine, a mocking condescension the man in question seems oblivious to. The Herald points at Amaranthine. “Kill her.”
The man’s face swivels towards her, his empty gaze suddenly becoming focused and clear. Amaranthine stumbles backwards, unable to stop herself as a smile breaks across the man’s face. It looks painful. His gums are bloody and a few of his teeth are cracked and chipped, as if he’s been clenching his jaw too tightly.
Amaranthine is forced to pull her attention from the man’s expressions when he lunges at her. Despite his lumbering gait, he’s faster than she anticipated.
It’s all she can do to switch the hammer out from its ranged cannon form, swinging the blunt instrument wildly and hitting the man in the side with a sickening crunch. He stumbles, but doesn’t fall, and Amaranthine nearly throws up at the sight of his torso, concave in the hammer’s shape, and the quickly blooming bruise spreading across it like an unfurling flower.
“Stop–” she tries. “Stop– I’m here to help, your sister asked me to find you!”
But her words have no effect on him. Maybe if she could remember his sister’s fucking name she could break him out of it somehow. She readies her hammer again, trying to create enough distance to bring it back into its ranged form.
“Do you see how happy he is?” The Machine Herald calls out over the sound of Amarathine’s panicked gasps. “I offered to evolve your father many times, and he always turned me down, but it is only fair I offer it to you as well, Defender. Your father lived and died a sad, lonely man. His petty work and shallow ideals brought him no joy. I regret my inability to save him, but let me atone by saving you.”
“You’re fucking insane!” Amaranthine yells as she dodges another attack from the man, nearly tripping over her own feet in the process.
“Ah, that sounds more like the Defender I know.”
When the man lunges again, Amaranthine aims her hammer low, swinging at his legs and wincing as it hits home. The man’s knees buckle as his ankles shatter, and he falls to the ground. She presses her boot down on his back, hard as she can manage, and takes deep, panting breaths as she locks eyes with the Machine Herald, still standing in his doorway.
Silence, again. Then the man underneath her begins to laugh. It’s a broken, choking sound. He coughs up a foamy burble of red, but still doesn’t stop laughing. It grows hysterical, the man shaking under her as she fights to keep him in place on the ground, stepping off of his back and kneeling at his side, holding his face up and to the side so he doesn’t choke with one hand while the other presses against his back, keeping him down.
His eyes are bloodshot and full of tears. One of the latches on his new skull has come loose, and a rotten looking grey slime leaks from the wound. He pushes his head forward, baring his teeth as if preparing to bite her, and she flinches away, letting go of his face. The unnatural weight of his head makes it crash into the cobblestone with a wet crunch. The man is still. The street is silent.
Amaranthine gets to her feet shakily, levering herself up with the hammer’s handle. The Herald's silhouette warps in her vision, and she focuses on the pounding of her heart, trying to slow the frantic beat. She feels as though she is standing on the helm of a ship, waves rocking beneath her feet as she struggles to stay upright. She leans on the hammer best she can, trying not to let it show.
“What now?” The Herald asks. He spreads his arms, third one raised above his head like a flagpole. “Am I insane, Defender? Are you going to put me down like a sick, rabid animal?”
“You’re not sick, you’re fucking evil.”
The Herald stills. He lowers his arms and tilts his head. He doesn’t approach, doesn’t initiate an attack. He’s still waiting for her to make the first move. Waiting for her to hit first.
Amaranthine doesn’t want to play this game anymore.
She bends down and hefts the body of the man into her arms. It’s a strain – she’s not as strong as Jayce was, not really strong at all, and the man isn’t light. But she makes it work. Once she’s got him balanced, she turns and takes one last look at the Machine Herald.
“I don’t know what he saw in you,” she says.
She straightens her back and takes the handle of the hammer. With the man’s corpse curled in her arms, she can’t flip it over her shoulder or hold it in front of her the way she’d like. She settles for dragging it across the ground, the screeching of metal against stone following her as she turns away from the Herald and begins her trek back to the Defender’s private conveyor.
Vi sits alone in what Caitlyn calls The Green Room and what Vi calls The Sitting Room With The Medium Fireplace. She’s slumped into an armchair nearly the size of a twin bed, nursing a glass of Demacian whiskey. Real fancy shit. Costs more than her childhood home would’ve sold for, she’s pretty sure.
She observes the whiskey more than drinks it, watching the sunlight refract through the crystal glass, which might have been even more expensive than the bottle of liquor itself.
She doesn’t really know that much about alcohol, for a girl raised in a bar. She never actually got a taste for the Zaunite stuff before she was arrested. She remembers the smell though. Vander would buy it by the barrel from ships on their way out of Bilgewater. Watered down swill sold for practically pennies by people looking to drop some deadweight off their ships or make a bit of quick coin before disappearing just as quickly as they’d docked.
It smelled like salt water and mildew and something sharp that would rise to the top and make her eyes water. The whole bar would take on its scent after the shipments came in. It would linger in the bloated wooden floorboards and their thin cotton sheets, in the strands of Powder’s hair that Vi tucked behind her ears.
Vander would mix it with other stuff – some kind of cheap rye liquor they shipped in from the north, or whatever local moonshine they could scrounge up when that ran out. Anything to raise the alcohol percentage. Taste wasn’t considered, and from what Vi can remember of her few rebellious swigs of the stuff around age fourteen, it wasn’t good. The smell wasn’t the only thing that burned.
The Demacian whiskey goes down smooth though. Or maybe she’s just grown up.
Technically, Vi isn’t meant to be drinking. She’s meant to be sober. Or semi-sober. She drinks socially, because it would look bad if she didn’t. But never more than a glass, and usually nothing stronger than a small flute of light and bubbly champagne – a taste that never grew on her, despite the majority of Vi’s life now having been spent in Piltover, where they seem obsessed with the stuff.
She figures she can be forgiven for the lapse. It’s not like Caitlyn’s been stellar about keeping her own promises lately. What happened to keeping Amaranthine safe? What happened to no more dead children? But there was her wife’s voice on the radio, recorded live from Amaranthine’s makeshift press conference, clear as day. Practically sending Amaranthine to the gallows herself with the Kirammen seal of approval.
Vi takes another drink.
She and Cait haven’t really talked about Jayce, beyond the obvious. It’s okay. She didn’t expect them to. They never talked about Jinx, either.
Jinx, braids shorn and makeup wiped clean, looking so much like Powder in that moment, with her back hunched over and arms curled around herself. Cait had been the one to call up to her, the megaphone projecting her voice up to Jinx’s place at the top of the Sun Gates. Asking her to turn herself in. To come down from the ledge.
Cait noticed the bomb before Vi did. She’d reached out an arm, as if she could’ve caught Jinx mid-fall, yelling out something Vi couldn’t understand in a panicked tone.
And then the explosion. Blue, of course. Even in her last moments, she had to make it a spectacle. She’d blown herself up, along with a good section of the Sun Gates tracks. Some kind of final statement, maybe. Or maybe she’d just wanted to make a scene.
Clean-up took barely over a week, and most of it was spent on getting out the stains. If Jinx had been attempting to make a statement, it was one of her least effective. The Sun Gates were repaired. Trade resumed soon after as though it had never ceased. The world kept turning. Vi went to work. She and Caitlyn didn’t talk about it. There was no funeral, or maybe there was, but not one anyone thought to invite Vi to.
Ekko may have held one. She didn’t know when they had started talking again – another reminder of just how distant her sister’s life had grown from her own. He showed up shortly after she– after the explosion. His face paint was smudged as if by a great burst of heat, like he’d been right there. Maybe he had been. Maybe she just didn’t notice – in the moment, she hadn’t been able to pull her eyes away from Jinx.
He’d tried to talk to her about it, and she’d brushed him off. Hasn’t seen him since, either. She tries not to think about what that might mean, but it’s hard not to connect the dots. Cop brain, she used to tease Cait.
Caitlyn has her corkboards, pinned up with red string. Vi visualizes her own internally, turning their faces around her head as if there’s any mystery to be solved, as if their deaths weren’t the most predictable fucking outcomes imaginable.
That’s the difference between her and Cait, she thinks. Caitlyn thinks it started now, with Jayce. That his death is the first crack in an otherwise strongly held foundation. That’s fine. Vi would never ask for Caitlyn to view Jinx’s death as anything other than a victory. A tragic one, maybe, but Caitlyn serves the city, and Vi understands why Piltover’s safety holds priority over her own bitter nostalgia. Her wife holds her at night, calms her shuddering breaths with gentle hands, and then goes to work in the morning. Puts on her uniform and adjusts her epaulettes with those same steady fingers, and she doesn’t shed a tear for the Zaunite anarchists and their reign of terror. And Vi goes with her.
Jayce’s death didn’t come as a shock to Vi when it finally happened, not the way it had for Cait. Vi wasn’t expecting it necessarily, but when the news came, it felt predictable, felt true, as if all the pieces had fallen into place exactly where they were always going to. The continuation of a pattern which had already begun and showed no signs of stopping. Something too late to stop, like a train barrelling towards them all. Jayce understood this too, Vi thinks. He hadn’t spoken to her about Jinx either since they weren’t supposed to be talking at all. Vi took Caitlyn’s side in their argument. She always picks Caitlyn’s side, even when she doesn’t know what it is she’s actually fighting for. It’s easier to be consistent than to keep making the wrong choice over and over and know it’s because of her bad decision-making that everything always goes wrong.
So they hadn’t talked about it, but she’d seen him on the Progress Day after. Everyone had, up at the front of the stage and plastered across every screen in the city. Saw him raise his empty hand as if giving an imaginary toast and listened to him give a stumbling, rambling speech about the importance of making choices and not being idle and taking control of one’s own life. It’d devolved into something incoherent near the end. Something about the statues that stared down at them and glass cultivairs filled with poison and blue smoke and Hextech and how it felt to fly, back when reality was something tangible that he could hold in his hands and shape.
As she and Caitlyn escorted him off stage, Vi could still hear him mumbling.
“She did it,” he’d said, face pressed, hot and sticky, against Vi’s shoulder. “She broke out, changed something.”
She didn’t change anything, Vi had thought. What could’ve possibly changed? Everything is exactly as it was, except now she’s gone, forever.
“Okay, buddy,” she’d said instead. “I think you’ve had enough to drink.”
Jayce had shaken his head as if he could hear her thoughts. “We’re all just corpses rotting in the sun, pretending to be people. We’re river scum, insect eggs. We hatch and die and hatch and die and it never fucking stops. She took herself out. She left the game. Broke the cycle, don’t you hear it? The clock stopped ticking.”
“Gods, Jayce,” Caitlyn had said. She’d looked disgusted.
Jayce had opened his mouth as if to say something else, then doubled over and threw up in a bush. Caitlyn pet his hair through it, and made an exaggeratedly exasperated expression towards Vi behind his back as he heaved. Her lips had twitched despite herself.
When Jayce regained his breath, his face was pale and he was somehow even sweatier than he’d been before. “I don’t want to play anymore,” he’d said, still hunched over. He looked small like this, rocking back forth as though a strong wind could blow him over.
It blew her over the edge, Vi thought, remembering Jinx’s skeletal arms pulled tight, holding herself together before she took that final step and didn’t need to hold on anymore. Powder fell down a well.
Caitlyn had told him to go home.
The enforcers on duty found him in his conveyor the next morning, down in Entresol.
Vi’s glass is empty. She pours herself another.
She’s taken the day off work. Called in sick. Well, as much as you can call in when your direct supervisor is your wife. She’d just leaned over in bed this morning, buried her face in her arms and claimed a migraine. Told Cait not to worry. Said she’d feel fine tomorrow. Caitlyn didn’t ask any questions, just kissed her gently on the forehead and told her to rest. Perk of the job.
Vi was barely even lying. She does have a headache. There hasn’t been a day she can remember, lately, where she hasn’t, but she figures she’s got enough sick days saved up to finally use some of them. And if she doesn’t, who cares? Her wife is the Sheriff. She inherited enough money with her wedding vows to retire in luxury for at least another full lifetime. It’s getting harder, as time moves forward, for Vi to remember why she does any of this at all.
A form of penance, taking responsibility for her role in Jinx’s development turned into an excuse to see her sister in any way she could, turned into an expectation that Vi can’t seem to wriggle out of. And now here she is. Fifty-one years old and moving on impulse, as if through a daze. Maybe it is like Jayce said. They’re just corpses pretending to be people, reenacting a cycle that never ends, where the only way to break it is to bury yourself.
Usually agreeing with Jayce would be a sign that she should stop drinking. She doesn’t.
It’s not like she’s planning to drink herself to death, like he did. First of all, she’s not a fucking lightweight. She grew up in a bar, for fuck’s sake. Second of all, she’s seen Jayce’s autopsy report and knows it wasn’t the booze that did him in.
It probably didn’t help, sure. But she’s sure the verifiable pharmacy of antipsychotics lining his insides did most of the heavy lifting.
The housekeeper found the bottles on the counter in the kitchen, lined up like they were awaiting a firing squad. A matching game of the empty bottles to pills found half-dissolved in Jayce’s stomach and bile, all noted neatly in the pathologist’s looping shorthand.
Three different medications prescribed to Jayce Giopara – she’s not sure if he was stocking up or if they were just left over from before he’d had his prescription changed – and one to Ximena Carrillo.
Quetiapine. Asenapine. Risperidone. Chlorpromazine. All gone down with the same Demacian whiskey that Vi’s drinking now. A toast to the golden boy, then!
She raises her glass to the empty room, then slumps back in her chair and downs the cup.
If it really was just them, in the cycle, or whatever Jayce wants to call it– that wouldn’t be so bad. And Cait’s strong, she’d make it through. But Jayce had to go and fucking spread it. Send the next generation in to keep the gears oiled and the wheels running.
Maybe Vi shouldn’t blame him. Maybe it’s not only them, and she’s just a self-centered bitch. Maybe it’s everyone in these stupid, rotting cities. She thinks about looking up the suicide statistics in Piltover. Thinks better of it. Pours herself another drink.
Here’s the thing about watching your estranged sister explode into a cloud of blue smoke and shrapnel – it’s hard to move on. It’s hard to think about things that aren’t blue paint flaking off into the ocean or the fact that you weren’t there to hear her last words, that you weren’t even the one trying to talk her off the ledge.
Vi knows that she’ll never stop seeing Jinx’s ghost, the way she never stopped seeing Powder’s. Something about the suddenness of it – the there-and-then-gone. And she means really gone, nothing left but the afterimage, because that’s something Jayce has given Caitlyn that Vi never got.
Thank you, she thinks, holding up her glass to the empty room in another mock toast. Thank you for leaving Cait a body to bury. Thank you for giving her a headstone to cry over, and a niece to remember you through, and a house to clear out, and a will that makes sure she knows you still loved her. Thank you for not leaving any room for doubt, for leaving the doors locked and windows closed and the pill bottles all lined up in a row to be counted and noted.
Jayce left Caitlyn clarity, made it so her cop-brain would have nothing to latch on to except the cold, painful truth. It’s probably the closest thing to closure either of them will ever get. Vi just hopes it’s enough.
The Machine Herald’s arm is still on a delay. He’s waved Naph off to bed, declared the experiment a failure for now, but there’s still something itching at him. The stopwatch he keeps on his work bench is malfunctioning and he can’t get an accurate reading of the delay – it was 0.8 milliseconds a week ago, but now the timer tells him that it’s functioning perfectly, and he knows that it isn’t.
It’s frustrating to work with subpar materials. His current theory is that the arm has become too heavy, weighing itself down while the Herald’s mind falsely perceives it to be lighter, causing a disconnect. This can happen, sometimes. His too-human mind forgets that the body it puppets is not, and he has to remind it, like the yearly pruning of a particularly stubborn cultivar.
It is not difficult work, but it is tedious. A millisecond delay can mean the difference between life and death during surgery, not to mention the heat of battle. Perhaps he is lucky that the new Defender is so inexperienced and easily shaken – he hadn’t needed to engage at all.
I don’t know what he saw in you.
The Herald twists the screwdriver with a particular viciousness at the memory of her words.
What does she know? He tries to tell himself. Everything she learned of progress she learned from her rigid, booze-sick father.
The words shouldn’t hurt. Not just because no words should hurt – he’s working on it – but because they’re meaningless. What did the Defender of Tomorrow see in the Machine Herald? Nothing, of course. A worthy enemy, perhaps. A threat against Piltover’s precious status quo. They aren’t meant to be people, they’re ideas. Immovable object meeting an unstoppable force. It’s just physics.
It’s why the title of Defender can be passed on. The Herald can never die, so neither can he.
So what exactly did the Defender tell his daughter that he saw in the Machine Herald?
It’s frustrating. It is – on some level – a betrayal. The Herald does not regale Naph with nostalgia-tinted stories about his Academy days. He doesn’t describe the way the Defender’s eyes crinkled when he smiled, or how his sweat tasted when he returned from the forge, or how when he spoke he made you feel like anything – anything – was possible. Because that’s private. It’s not who they are anymore, and the Herald keeps it locked up inside his chest, a mutually agreed upon secret between him and the Defender.
So what does the Defender’s prodigal daughter know of their past? Of a time when the Defender might have seen anything inside the Herald except disdain?
He flexes his fingers. The delay seems even longer now, bordering on visible.
He unscrews his recent work, readjusting. Maybe he needs to give up recalibration and just reduce the weight manually. There must be something auxiliary that he can remove, even just temporarily, to get a gauge on how deep the problem runs.
His body is heavy now. It doesn’t weigh on him, because his body is also strong, but he thinks of the way he once stumbled, coltish and naive, following a toy boat down the river. The boat pulled along by the current and Viktor pushed forward by the breeze.
Now he can stand his ground against a hurricane, keep himself anchored in place. He knows, logically, that he is graceful. That movement comes easily because he controls it fully, no outside force pushing him down or kicking his cane out from under him.
Or, at least it would, if not for this fucking delay.
The Herald pulls a section of wires to the side, pinning them in place and shining a pinlight from one of his eyes down into the panel on his arm.
When the Herald thinks of wind, of a force that drags you into its current and won’t let you go, he thinks of Jayce. Blasphemous, he knows, but he’s never been one for religion, and back in the gilded halls of Piltover’s academy, Janna never felt so far away.
Jayce had an energy about him, a magnetism, that pulled people in. He wasn’t popular or even generally liked, but when he spoke, people listened. It was the easiest thing in the world to listen to Jayce. Eyes would be drawn to him from the moment he walked into a room, faces turned like blooms towards the sunrise. Viktor wasn’t immune – he was only human, after all.
And when Viktor became the Herald, he cut that dependency out, leaving the gory pulp of his love in the biohazard disposal bin of their shared lab. He filled the hole it left with copper wires and steel. He moved the fuck on.
But now Jayce is dead, and Viktor feels like he can’t move. Limbs restrained with a lead chain and dropped into the sea. Stone-filled pockets, the way Jayce once admitted he’d fantasized about. The anchor of a ship digging into the silt. Any way you twist it, the common denominator is as obvious as it is insulting.
The Machine Herald never managed to cut out his pathetic, pitiful affection for his mortal enemy, and thus the Machine Herald has never existed. He’s just Viktor, still. Lonely, sickly Viktor, who once agreed to a suicide pact if both he and Jayce were still working under Heimerdinger at forty years old. Viktor, who should’ve died at thirty-one, still crawling along on his stomach, the world’s longest case of a cadaveric spasm.
Well, fuck that.
The Machine Herald might not exist, but he will. Viktor thought he’d done it before, and he’d been mistaken. That’s fine. Every experiment comes with its failures. Viktor has already gone through the processes of replacing those fleshy and too-human parts of his body – he can do it again. He just has to trace back the line, find out where he’d made such a critical error, and work from there.
It was a mistake to attempt to build a life when he was still building himself. This was his mistake before – involving others while the process was still in development. By letting a version of himself that was still partially Viktor be seen, he was keeping Viktor alive, thereby tainting all the work he’s done up to this point. The Machine Herald cannot exist separately from Viktor if Viktor still resides within the Machine Herald.
This time it will be more difficult – he has a life here, and people who do not deserve to be abandoned without notice the way the faculty of Piltover did. It is harder to leave behind a life that you were not born grieving. Viktor always knew he would die, and lived every moment with that knowledge lodged in the back of his throat. The Machine Herald expected to live forever.
And he will – Viktor just has to do it right this time. Maybe when he’s done, when he’s complete, he can find Naph and Blitzcrank and explain, but for now it is integral that they not interfere.
He gets shakily to his feet, not bothering to close the maintenance panel on his arm. He understands what he needs to do. He’ll need somewhere isolated, somewhere no one will find him. Somewhere hidden enough that he can take his time, make sure every trace of Viktor-and-Jayce (because that’s the problem, isn’t it? That they were always more like one creature than two, codependent to a fault, and now that Jayce has died he’s left Viktor with a necrotic half-self. Recommended treatment: surgical debridement, amputation, maggots and a lobotomy–) has been burned away and kept from infecting the rest of his body.
His hands are steady for what feels like the first time in days. Clarity is a balm upon his fever-slick mind. He imagines emerging from a chrysalis, whole for the first time. An independence he did not realize he was lacking, finally granted. Unshackled from his past, free to focus, truly and entirely, on his mission.
Being reborn, he thinks, will be beautiful. His limbs are heavy, the weight of the metal apparent with each step he takes toward the door. He imagines it is because they are holding too much inside – a crab outgrowing its shell, a snake constricted by its own unshed skin. The Machine Herald does exist, somewhere underneath all of what is Viktor. He just needs to let him out.
Viktor is missing.
To most of Zaun, the Machine Herald often disappears for months at time, only to resurface with some new invention or upgrade tailor-designed to haunt children’s nightmares. His absence is unsettling, because of what it portends, but it is expected.
But not Naph. Naph is always there with him, rewiring limbs or dissecting specimens or soldering steel panels together. If Viktor needs something from one of his other safehouses, Naph knows where he’s going and when he is expected to return. If he is late, Naph is able to find him.
But Naph hasn’t been able to find Viktor in a week. All the safehouses he frequents are untouched, the air stagnant and heavy with dust. There haven’t been any rumored sightings that Naph can follow up on either, an equally frustrating improbability.
Each knock on the door has had him shooting up from his workbench and racing to the peephole, only to slump when inevitably he finds only a prospective patient (turned away) or a particularly brave cultist (violently turned away).
It’s when Renata starts sending her men down that he knows he’s really fucked. Viktor has debts that Naph can’t even begin to know how to repay, and Glasc Industries doesn’t hire goons based on their negotiation skills. He manages to send the first few back with empty promises of the Herald’s return, but it isn’t a sustainable solution. Glasc won’t accept excuses for long – only Viktor’s reliable reputation with his past payments keeps her at bay, and as soon as she realizes he’s missing and not just absent, the sword will come down on Naph’s neck.
There’s an itch under his skin that Naph can’t seem to scratch. Crawling insects and chem-pollutant rashes. He feels like the walls of the house on Emberflit are closing down around him. He’s always considered himself lucky; most Zaunites are never afforded a long-term residence and the stability it grants, but now, even as that stability verges on crashing down around him, he can’t help but feel stifled by the brick walls and frosted windows. The world tilts on its axis, lingering over a precipice.
Amaranthine wakes up with a shout on her lips. She’s sweat through her sleep clothes (a baby-pink nightdress with cream lace trim) and her bonnet (matching pink) is askew. She doesn’t remember her dream, but it isn’t difficult for her to guess.
The Mercury Hammer sits beside her, bathing the room in its familiar blue glow. She’s taken to keeping it with her at all times, paranoid both of it being stolen and of being seen without it. It hasn’t been difficult – she doesn’t leave the house much.
She’s meant to be cleaning it up, sorting Jayce’s belongings into keep and sell and throw away piles to be dealt with thusly. She’s meant to be talking with real estate agencies and staging the empty rooms in an inoffensive and minimalist style – an off-white dollhouse with beige accents. It wouldn’t even be hard. She’s pretty sure Jayce never moved any of the pre-furnished pieces after buying the place anyway.
She hasn’t been doing any of that. Instead, she’s been wandering through the rooms like a ghost, dragging Jayce’s hammer behind her and trying to forget the sensation of bloody foam on her skin. She’s been ordering in a lot and not doing the dishes. Letting the mail pile up.
Caitlyn’s been over a few times. Reggie Ferros left her a gift basket from his patrons and a casserole that he made himself. She hasn’t told anyone what she did, except the man’s sister – whose name she has forgotten again – when she returned his body.
She didn’t seem surprised that Amaranthine hadn’t been able to bring him back alive. Amaranthine tried to summon some indignance at this, but was unable. She was right, after all.
Amaranthine paid for the man’s burial in cash. From the glint in the woman’s eye, she’s sure that she pocketed a fair portion of the money, but what does Amaranthine care? Hopefully she uses it to get out of her cult and start a business selling, like, homemade woven baskets or some shit. It’s not Amaranthine’s fucking problem anymore, even if she can’t get the sight of the man’s dilated pupils and yellow teeth out of her head.
Amaranthine turns around in her bed and closes her eyes against the hammer’s blue glow, willing herself to fall back asleep. The sound of the songbirds rising is what finally lulls her into an uneasy rest.
He needs to find Viktor. He has not found Viktor.
Naph left the house on Emberflit behind about a week ago, when visits from Glasc Industries turned from questioning to actively threatening. He’s been skirting between safehouses and the couches of former patients that he can trust. He doesn’t stay anywhere long, not wanting to give Renata a hint of where he is. If Viktor can disappear into the ether, surely he can too. He just has to find him.
He’s been staying in the attic of a small fishery for the last few nights, but knows he’ll have to move on soon. No one he’s spoken to has heard any word from the Machine Herald, but in a way that comes as a balm. Surely Viktor would not die quietly, if he can die at all. No news now, nearly a month since Naph has last seen his mentor, is beginning to feel like good news. It means that Viktor is just biding his time. And it’ll be hell when he gets back – someone is going to have to pay for leaving Renata hanging – but he’ll deal with it. He always has a way, some trick up his sleeve.
The fishery is located not directly on the coast, but on the bank of a small river that feeds into it. Apparently, the brackish water is fertile breeding grounds for a number of specific aquatic species, the names of which have already deserted Naph’s memory. Apparently, it gives the fishers here a bit of a leg up on their competitors on the coast, at least during certain times of year, which is enough to keep them in business. If you ask Naph, no one should be eating anything caught this close to Zaun, because the amount of chemtech run-off in the water is literally the worst in all of Runeterra, but he’s also never been one to turn down a warm meal.
He walks along the river now, watching children clamor along the slimy rocks and splash each other, spluttering dramatically when they inevitably swallow a mouthful of muddy water. He tries not to wince, knowing how many of these kids are going to develop chronic skin conditions or give themselves infections just by touching the water, but he also knows how important it is for them to just be kids. Any child diving into the oil-slick river is a child who is not working in the chem-tech factories or the steel mills or the fighting pits. The risks that the polluted river water poses aren’t any more dangerous than the complications that simply breathing in Zaun’s air can cause.
Besides, the water quality is better than it was when he was a kid. Probably. There’s been enough uppercity initiatives to clean the water that he sure hopes some change has been made. He spins the idea of a large scale water purifier in his head, something that can be used for natural bodies of water like this instead of just in homes, clipped over a faucet or shower head. Maybe he’ll share it with Viktor, after he finds him. They’d have to talk to the fishers, figure out a way to do it that wouldn’t impact trout migration or whatever they were on about. It’d be something to do, something easier to swallow than Viktor’s last experiment on the cultist.
Naph’s been trying not to think about that. About the crunch of the cultist’s body against the Defender’s hammer, his broken bones made visible through the skin where the hammer’s light shone through his torso. The sick glee in his eyes, even during his final moments.
He’d rather work on a water purifier, he thinks. He’d rather learn everything there is to know about fish husbandry and squid spawning habits than ever see that expression on another human being’s face again.
He hadn’t said anything to Viktor, after. Viktor had called the experiment a disappointment. Naph had walked on eggshells around his mentor, not wanting to ignite the spark that would set off Viktor’s anger, the kind that would sometimes rise up after self-proclaimed failures. He thought that he’d been successful when he’d avoided a shouting match, but Viktor was gone the next day, his bedroom empty and his bed cold.
He’s walked further along the river bank now, far enough that the children’s shrieking laughter is nothing but distant echoes. The river has shrunk as he’s gone on, growing thinner and shallower. He doesn’t see any fish when he peers over the edge, but the water is cloudy enough that he figures there may still be some minnows lurking about. Probably frogs too.
When he was young, back when Viktor first took him on as his apprentice, he’d walked him through the steps of dissecting frogs. He never really questioned where he got them, but he supposes it could’ve been here. There’s no way Viktor would go all the way up to the Pilt to collect specimens, and this river is close enough to Emberflit that Viktor is probably familiar with it. Maybe he even played in it as a child, though Naph has a hard time picturing Viktor doing anything as juvenile as laughing and splashing in the chem-laden waters. More likely, he just dissected frogs on the shore, to the horror of the other children.
Naph slips on a particularly slimy rock, and looks up to realize that in his wandering, he’s stumbled down a hill and into a sort of alcove. The water is shaded here, the rocks near the shore unable to dry down and instead taking on a permanent film of algae growth.
The dim light catches on something metallic, and Naph carefully steps forward, making sure to watch his footing. The rest of the rocks are all a uniform grey-green, so it’s easy to discern the shining metal from its surroundings. At first he thinks it’s just a piece of scrap, not uncommon, but as he approaches his stomach drops.
It’s the Machine Herald’s mask. Something Viktor would never take off in public, and it’s been left half-submerged in silt down at the bottom of a muddy stream. Dread pours through Naph’s veins, the relative calm of his walk forgotten in an instant. He can no longer hear the children laughing, can’t hear anything except the blood rushing through his ears.
He lifts the mask carefully, wiping off the mud with his sleeve. It’s scratched up, but not badly, likely just from knocking against the river rocks as the tide carried it down. It doesn’t look like it was ripped from Viktor’s face, and there’s no blood that he can see – though depending on how long it’s been in the river, that may not mean much.
“Viktor?” Naph calls out. He gets no response.
Steeling his nerves, he ventures forward, now keeping his eyes sharp for any sign of movement.
“Viktor?” He calls again. He strains his ears for a response, but all he can hear is the babbling of the river.
It isn’t movement his eyes pick up on next, only more shining metal. He doesn’t pick it up this time. It’s one of the maintenance panels for Viktor’s arms. Not a critical feature, not anything life threatening to remove, but chilling nonetheless. Who would know to remove it, know the way to access the vulnerable wires and sensors that lay underneath the innocuous plating?
It’s as if finding the panel opens a dam. Suddenly, Viktor is everywhere. Naph can barely go two steps without tripping over another broken-off piece of his mentor. A gear, tacky with oil, left among the reeds. A wire tangled into a clump of river weeds. A mechanism Naph recognizes as part of Viktor’s filtration system, which should be kept safe within the tubing of his mechanical lungs, but is instead left to corrode in the shallows, littering flakes of rust into the current.
It’s too much – but not anything critical. Not anything that would immediately signify Viktor as dead. This is not Viktor’s corpse, spread out in a grisly display like a serial killer’s gory masterpiece – it’s the aftermath of something. A fight, maybe? But with who? There’s no sign of anyone else at all, no blood other than Viktor's own, which creates an oil-slick film across the water’s surface and dries black against the rocks.
Maybe there was a fight, and this is where Viktor escaped to afterwards. Somewhere covert and hidden that the Herald could stay to lick his wounds. If he’s this injured, it makes sense why he hasn’t returned home, especially if he’s expecting someone to be waiting to finish him off. It’s good that Naph found him. Based on what he’s seeing, Viktor should be fine, but unable to fully repair himself with key mechanisms damaged and lacking the materials to accommodate such a venture.
“Viktor?” Naph calls out again, but he isn’t really expecting an answer this time. Viktor’s voice box might be damaged, probably his hearing too. It’s hard to say. The damage doesn’t seem restricted to any single part of Viktor’s body. Armor and augments are strewn indiscriminately across the river bed. He hopes that Viktor can hear him, at least. That he knows Naph is here to help him.
The stream leads him to the mouth of a cave, and Naph ducks down to enter with very little hesitance. It’s a good hiding place. He vaguely wonders how Viktor found it, if he knew it was here or if he just got lucky.
Naph’s eyes take a moment to adjust to the light and when they do, he is momentarily shocked into stillness. The cave is lit with bioluminescent growth; purple, cup-shaped fungus that grows out of the clustered holes in the cave walls; some kind of shiny monocot with fan-shaped leaves and glowing inflorescence; leafy ferns with great, glowing sori that pulse on their undersides. Nothing Naph has ever seen before, the light they emit differs from that of the powdery mushrooms that populate the mine shafts and the pale algae that blankets Zaun’s coast, which are the only types of bioluminescent plants he’s seen in person. They’re not like the Ionian or Ixtali species he’s seen in textbook diagrams either, wide-petaled flowers with glowing pollen or bubbly succulents. These are undeniably Zaunite plants.
They have the sickly yellow hue and leggy growth of a supposedly temperate plant that has never seen the sun. Illuminated only by themselves, the plants look sinister rather than warm, bathed in light that seems almost artificial. The luminescence doesn’t wink in and out like firelights, but instead seem to whir, sputtering at times like an overextended engine. On closer inspection, the rhythmic pulsing of the ferns’ sori reminds Naph less of a heartbeat and more of ticking clock, unseen gears notching into place behind the plant’s skin.
When Naph finally manages to tear his gaze away from the flora, his eyes catch on the only other thing of note within the cavern. They glaze over the dusty workbenches and shattered test tubes, focused only on the sight at the center of the room. A wheezing gasp leaves his throat as he stumbles forward, dropping the Machine Herald’s mask in a clatter as he does.
A trail of oil-slick blood leads to something that cannot, in any good conscience, be described as a body. It is a scrap heap. It is a massacre.
The parts floating in the river outsider were not integral to Viktor’s immediate survival. These are. Without a comprehensive catalog, it’s hard to say what’s here, but at first glance Naph can identify a piece of mesh that should be pinned inside the lining of Viktor’s stomach; a piston mechanism that regulates his intake of air and the opening of his fans; and a bundle of wires, violently yanked out of their home, copper cores exposed and fraying at the ends, that are so long they can only have been the ones that connect through Viktor’s fingertips and up to his brainstem.
And blood. There is so much blood. The ground is sticky with it, the steel of Viktor’s augments muted and monotonous under their dark stain.
How do you bury a body like this? Does he get a bag, pack the pieces of Viktor away like a sump-rat returning from the dump with a haul of scrap metal? Does he melt him down? Is he supposed to reuse these parts? And what of the rest of him – where is the Viktor still made of flesh and bone, no matter how small the percentage?
Naph vomits, the nausea coming over him suddenly and unexpectedly. It surprises him – he’s seen dead bodies before. He’s seen gore that would make the most experienced Piltover surgeons blanch. The sight has never made him sick like this. He’s heard before that it’s the smell that turns people’s stomachs, but he can’t catch any of that familiar rot now, not over the familiar and biting scent of iron and gasoline – of Viktor’s augmented blood.
The rot and decay of a body is something that lingers on the back of your tongue and invades each of your senses. The soft bruise of a fruit left out in the sun, fecal-sweet and heavy as the Grey. Naph is used to this scent, though he associates it more with septic limbs and the furnace Viktor uses to dispose of them than bloated corpses. As he stumbles closer, he manages to find its presence, hidden underneath the metallic sting of axle grease and oil.
At the center of the mess, propped up against an old stool, lies what-was-once-Viktor. Its spine is still connected to its skull, and so are the bones of the torso. It looks impossibly skeletal, ribs flayed open on hinges that they installed years ago to make routine maintenance easier, an act that suddenly seems sickeningly violent rather than convenient. Its left arm is still hanging on by a few straining pieces of tubing and fraying musculature, though most of its plating has been stripped, lying abandoned on the floor beside the body.
The weight of the arm pulls the body to the side, leaving its face to slump at an unnatural angle while its titanium spine stays ramrod straight, just like it was designed to.
When a normal human body is left to rot, the eyes are the first thing to go. Soft, milky tissue that bacteria and birds flock to and liquify, leaving behind hollow caverns for wasps to lay their eggs. This is not the case here. This body’s eyes are a fine combination of tempered glass and paper thin steel. Smokey black scleras and yellow irises that it could rotate to focus and magnify its vision, glowing faintly in dim light. They’re still glowing now, the mechanisms running on their own localized power source, separate from the body’s more vital systems. It made them easier to do maintenance on.
The glow of the eyes makes the body appear almost alive, like there’s still a soul present behind them, which just makes everything surrounding them so much worse to look at. The light casts the sallow face in a watery yellow fluorescence that hides nothing. The body’s skin, always too thin, is nearly transparent, wilting off the face and highlighting the shapes of the machinery underneath. Vein-like wires, normally hidden by a thin layer of fat, bulge from beneath eye sockets, and the place where the skin of the face meets the metal paneling of the cheekbones has degraded in a way that seems fragile and precarious, grey and curled, as if the tissue has finally decided to reject the foreign cells after decades of careful symbiosis. The magnetized ports where the Herald’s mask would clasp on have been dug out, reduced to scabbed over and pus-filled holes.
A dry line of black blood traces a path from the body’s half-open mouth (teeth stained grey, tongue swollen and bulbous) and down its neck, collecting in a pool at the collarbones.
Nothing below the pelvic bone is connected, instead strewn across the room haphazardly, nerves and wires and ligaments severed with either the tearing force of a metal hand or the clean break of a death ray. The joint where the body’s third arm should be welded into its spine is still there, raised and streaked with black blood, but the arm itself has been twisted off, leaving behind a jagged break of bone-sharp metal. It must have been one of the last things to go.
Naph wishes he could blame this on an attacker. Anyone else would. No one, the enforcers would say, if they ever deigned to investigate this case, could do this to themself.
No one but Viktor, Naph thinks.
There is no sign that anyone else was here. No sign of the room being disturbed as if through prolonged battle. The only evidence of Viktor’s death ray being activated is on his own corpse, singed breaks in the metal used to neatly pry apart plating before clawing at the mechanisms within.
Organs picked apart as if by wild animals– as if any animal could mistake those sacks of metal and plastic for sustenance. It looks frenzied, and yet it’s clear that Viktor broke himself apart with purpose. Starting with the least essential and moving inwards. His ultimate cause of death, though many of these losses would have eventually done him in, is clear. In his left hand, still curled tight, is his heart. Vascular tubing is pulled loose and lying across the dirty floor. The heart itself, one of Viktor’s greatest masterpieces, so simple and so efficient, is distorted inside his unforgiving grip, deflated and crusted over with dried pseudo-blood. What went through his head that made Viktor rip his own heart out? That made Viktor rip his own heart out last?
Naph crouches down, trying to ignore the sudden proximity of those glowing, intelligent eyes, and gently pries the fingers of Viktor’s left hand loose. The heart retains its dented shape, the imprint of metal fingers engraved in the plastic from their force.
Naph remembers Viktor’s heart surgery. All in all, it wasn’t that difficult. Traditional heart transplants were uncommon but certainly not unheard of, and the technology and techniques were there already. It wasn’t something they’d had to invent from the ground up, the way many of Viktor’s augments required. Viktor needed a new heart before he could replace his blood, because his new blood would be thicker and denser and slightly corrosive to organic tissue. While it did incorporate some metal, the majority of Viktor’s heart augment was made up of a mix of synthetic polymer and glass, giving it an elasticity that some of his less integral organs lacked.
It was one of those creations that Naph was able to recognize as truly revolutionary, as potentially world-changing. The kind of invention that allowed Naph to push down his doubts about Viktor – his methods, his ideology, his personality, all of it – because this made it worth it. If it wasn’t the key to immortality, it was at least a lockpick. A potential. The kind of thing only someone like Viktor could think up, someone who believed in what he was doing with such conviction that it led him to bring the impossible into reality.
As revolutionary as the wheel, he’d thought. As fire. A modern man’s Hextech.
He resents Viktor for dying, he realizes. There is still work to be done. Someone still needs to bring the fire down to man.
Naph picks the Machine Herald’s mask off the ground when he leaves the cave.
“Somebody has to do it.”
No they don’t, Blitzcrank doesn’t say. A useless argument to have. They’ve been going in circles for what feels like hours. It’s been barely ten minutes. Ten minutes, thirty-four seconds, and six-hundred-and-eleven milliseconds, to be exact. Thirty-five seconds, now.
Ten minutes and thirty-five seconds since Naph tapped Blitzcrank on the back and led them into a shadowed alleyway. Fidgety and evasive, he’d admitted that Renata Glasc’s men were after him and that Viktor was dead.
It was too much information at once. While Blitzcrank buffered, Naph pulled the Machine Herald’s mask out of his side satchel and admitted his intentions to take on the mantle.
Nine more minutes have passed unproductively since then.
“Why does it have to be you?” Blitzcrank asks. They think it is a fair question – The Machine Herald has followers much more blindly devoted than Naph, who has always had the impulses of a skeptic despite his unwavering loyalty.
Naph reels back as if the question is insulting.
“I’m his– I was his apprentice.”
He says the word apprentice as though it carried the weight of son. Blitzcrank knows that it does. This wasn’t their argument.
“You are no one’s apprentice now,” they say. You are free. You don’t have to do this.
“No one else was trained like me,” Naph insists. Again, this is not what Blitzcrank is arguing. It does not matter who is the most qualified. No one needs to do this.
Viktor would have never wanted to hear it, unable to even conceptualize the concept, but Zaun does not need a Machine Herald. The same way Zaun felt no loss when the Mad Chemist departed the city to inflict his poisons on nations across the sea, the Machine Herald is a boogeyman, not a pillar. He is a scary story to tell children and a last resort when you are on death’s door, often leaving those he treats with worse debts than a chembaron. Debts that cannot be repaid in anything but blood.
Yes, Zaun needs a doctor. Zaun could, in fact, use many doctors. They are critically low on people who can safely remove bullets, treat disease, and disinfect wounds. Naph is trained in all these things and so much more. There is no reason for him to utilize these talents as a predatory ghost story, simply because he thinks said ghost story must continue.
“Why did you come here?” Blitzcrank asks. Father never asked or valued their opinion on his work. If Naph intends to continue it, Blitzcrank will expect the same.
“I didn’t come to ask your permission, if that’s what you mean.” It isn’t. “I just thought I should let you know that he– you know. Even if you weren’t close– He was your father.”
“He was yours too,” Blitzcrank offers. Naph shakes his head, but Blitzcrank persists. “He was not a good one. Perhaps he did not treat you with the care that a human child requires. That is just the type of father he was. He was our father, and I will–” Blitzcrank hesitates. They do not know what they will do. Luckily, their predictive algorithm kicks in and answers for them. “–grieve him, but as his creation and as the closest thing you have to a sibling–” Naph sniffs back something that might be tears, “–I am urging you not to follow his path.”
“I don’t have a choice,” Naph says, in a voice much smaller than his size and age would suggest. He hunches in on himself, staring down at the Machine Herald’s mask as if it will answer him.
“There is always a choice.”
Naph just shakes his head. Blitzcrank wonders how he could ever doubt his place as Viktor’s son. It is the exact same response the Herald always gave.
A dance hall on the Promenade level has gone up in flames. A great explosion, something so dramatic that, a few years ago, it would have been immediately attributed to Jinx. Instead the radio is announcing the dreaded return of the Machine Herald.
Amaranthine has already been made aware, well on her way to Zaun when the news breaks to the general public, Mercury Hammer held tight so in her hands that it is leaving grooves in her palms. She doesn’t know what the Herald’s goal is with this – it’s been years since he engaged in something so publicly destructive with no clear gain, but she can tell from their last meeting that he’s gone completely off the deep end. She shouldn’t be expecting rational lines of thought from the man actively trying to bring about the end of humanity.
The scene has been evacuated when she arrives, only the fire squad and some straggling enforcers pass Amaranthine as she makes her way down the streets approaching the scene of the crime. The Herald is still there, they tell her. They don’t know if he’s keeping any civilians hostage or if he has any demands. This isn’t abnormal – they expect him to wait for the Defender. Whatever he has to say will only be said with his intended audience present. The spectacle of it all turns Amaranthine’s stomach – she finds herself once again wondering what the point of it all is.
The Herald has positioned himself at the entrance of what would’ve once been a fairly magnificent dance hall and is now nothing more than a smoldering pile of ashes.
It is immediately obvious that something is different about him. It’s his posture, the way he holds himself. He keeps looking around like he’s unsure what direction the Defender will approach from and he’s fidgeting, kicking one of his legs back and forth and creating a grove in the ashy dirt at his feet.
She wonders if he’s high, if his questionable behavior stems from not just an unstable mind, but an unstable mind overflooded with unregulated undercity substances. Do drugs even work on him? Can you smoke with prosthetic lungs?
“Machine Herald,” she greets him, and he whips around to meet her gaze. She narrows her eyes, taking him in. His hair is shorter. His armour is different, which maybe accounts for the fact that he looks broader than she remembers. Broader but shorter, she thinks, although it’s hard to tell. She didn’t exactly take his measurements last time they met.
“Defender,” he responds, and even through the voice modulator, she can detect a waver in his voice.
He doesn’t raise his laser. She doesn’t raise her hammer. They just stand there, facing each other. It’s almost awkward. She waves a hand through the air, gesturing to the burnt out scene around them.
“What is… all this?” She asks.
The Herald kicks his foot through the dirt again, almost sheepishly.
“You know how it is with loan sharks,” he says, which explains nothing.
She does her best to look around him, trying to piece out if he’s hiding any bodies or dying civilians that he plans to drag back down to Entresol. She doesn’t see anything. She’s pretty sure the dance halls in Zaun don’t even open until the evening. If he wanted to catch people in the blast, he picked a pretty poor time.
“Okay, well, this is private property, so you can’t just blow it up.”
“I mean, I did,” he says. Hard to argue with that. She doesn’t really fancy aiming her hammer at a man over something as petty as property destruction.
He reaches around to scratch the back of his neck absently, and his third arm finally whirs to life behind him, causing Amaranthine to lift her hammer in preparation.
“Wait– No– I didn’t mean to do that–” The Herald says, holding all three of his hands up in the air. The third one begins to charge its laser and he swears, slapping his right hand a few times until a blue gemstone pops out of the back of his glove. The third arm goes dead and falls limp across his back.
“You’re not the Machine Herald,” Amaranthine says. She had suspicions but this confirms it. The Herald has been described many ways, but clumsy or nervous or scared of his own limbs the way this man seems to be were never any of them. He wilts at the accusation.
“Yes, I am,” he says. He’s fiddling with the clasps of the mask now, as if Amaranthine would recognize him underneath it, but then he removes it and– she does. It’s the Machine Herald’s apprentice. Naph.
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t know if she has the right to ask what happened. If it’s what she suspects, it’d definitely be weird to offer her condolences. It’s hard to feel too bad – she came here with the non-explicit intent to murder the Herald, after all, or at least grievously wound him enough to send him away.
This kind of blows. Maybe if she’d fought the actual Machine Herald more than once, she’d have some kind of leverage, but as it is, he’s left her in a bit of an awkward position. If neither of them are the originals, neither of them really have any quarrel with the other. Naph hasn’t done anything except blow up an empty building. Amaranthine didn’t even hit his dad with her hammer the last time she saw him. There’s no old dirt to dig up or wounds to poke at, except for the obvious ones that they share.
But she can’t just let him go, right? Petty as it is, destruction of property is a crime, and she can’t imagine the enforcers taking it well if she goes back and tells them that she let the Herald off the hook because she just didn’t think it was that big a deal.
“I have to take you in,” she says, “for blowing up the building.”
He winces.
“Do you really? I didn’t, like, want to. And nobody got hurt.”
She shrugs. “It’s illegal. To blow up buildings, I mean.”
“You can’t just tell them I escaped?”
“Puts me in kind of a bad position. This is technically meant to be my first official battle with the Machine Herald.” She doesn’t raise the hammer though.
“S’not like your dad ever managed to bring him in, though. There’s no way they’re expecting you to actually put me under arrest. No offence.”
Amaranthine lets out a puff of air, tilting her head back and trying to will away an incoming headache. “Why are you even doing this?” She asks. “You don’t seem all that enthusiastic about the Glorious Evolution. Not the way he was.”
Naph shrugs. It’s a motion that looks awkward inside the Machine Herald’s armour; it wasn’t built to express emotional physicality the way a person does. “Somebody has to do it,” he says.
Amaranthine stays silent. She doesn’t really believe him – what real purpose does the Machine Herald serve, in the larger scheme of things? But she can’t argue with him either, because she made the same choice.
She decides that it doesn’t look like Naph is going to shoot her anytime soon and takes her chances sitting down on a knee-high pile of burnt and crumbling brickwork. “You can do it all?” She asks. “Not just the–” gestures at the explosion site around them, “–like, the surgeries? The augmentations?”
He shrugs again, kicking his feet through the dirt. “Yeah, I guess. Not as good as he could, I think. I mean, I can do it all, but coming up with the stuff he did…”
Amaranthine knows how that feels. Jayce was, before anything else, an inventor. His eyes picked up on details that Amaranthine struggled to comprehend, things that only made sense to her once he had already placed the last piece in place. His head was always in the clouds, his focus on things so far in the future as to be practically fantasy for anyone not tuned into his exact way of thinking. It makes sense that the Herald was the same way, that they were the same kind of crazy.
“Are you gonna do it then? Go full metal?” She asks. She does some kind of aborted robot-charade as she says it, bending her elbows at a ninety-degree angle, before deciding that’s dumb and probably offensive, and awkwardly dropping her arms back to her sides.
It might be a pointless question. There’s a chance that Naph is already ninety percent machine and he just hides it. It’s not like Amaranthine actually knows him at all.
“I guess,” he says, and sounds deeply unenthusiastic about it.
Amaranthine makes a face that she hopes communicates her disdain for the idea. “I mean, you don’t have to.”
“Would be kind of hypocritical not to,” he says. He pauses, as if thinking hard about the right words to use. “I mean, it’s not like I’m against it. The Glorious Evolution and all. And I think Viktor – the Machine Herald, I mean – is right. That it’s going to happen. That it’s inevitable. It’s just nature, right? Evolution. He’s– I’m just speeding it along.”
“So what’s the point then? If it’s inevitable.”
“I mean, I think world peace is inevitable.” Amaranthine pulls a face. “No, I’m serious. You have to believe, right, that eventually we’ll figure it all out? But still, you want to move the timeline up, ideally within your own lifetime, or your children’s.”
“So you think turning everyone into robots will bring about world peace?”
“It’s not about robots! It’s about– it’s about curing illness, and stopping death, and eliminating human error. Machines are something which we have the ability to perfect, and if we make ourselves into machines then we unlock the ability to perfect ourselves.”
“Thus bringing about a perfect world.”
“Yeah.” Naph deflates again. He seems to have used up his limited burst of energy on what was honestly a bit of a lackluster speech.
“So what does blowing up a dance hall have to do with that?”
Naph groans, dragging a gauntleted hand down his face. “I have– Viktor’s patron was kind of pissed when he fucked off. He was in a lot of debt. It was either this or find a way to make a lot of money very quickly. This seemed easier.”
“So just doing some chembaron’s dirty work, then?” She asks.
“Sure. And you’re just doing the enforcers’.”
It’s a fair point. This is, at its most extreme, an act of vandalism. It will have the intended effect of scaring the property owner straight and keeping whatever chembaron patronizes the Machine Herald secure and happy. The enforcers can’t do anything, and probably don’t really care, because this is a clear cut case of a Zaunite citizen committing a crime inside the borders of Zaun, and technically Zaun is meant to be an independent city-state and not a Piltovan mining colony.
The Defender, on the other hand, has full reign of both cities, positioned in a grey zone between police, civilian, and independent anti-terrorism militia. As long as Piltover decides she hasn’t overstepped, there’s nothing Zaun can do to keep her out.
Amaranthine hums, agreeing. She kicks her legs back and forth, like a kid riding a swing. She watches the dust and ash rise in the air as she disturbs it. By this time tomorrow, it will probably blow down to the sea level and blanket Zaun’s shores in an ashy film. The pumps will get clogged and everyone will have to don their respirator masks. Everyone in Zaun, at least. Up here, they’ll just complain about the view.
“I have a marketing degree,” she says, apropos of nothing. Naph blinks at her. “I just mean– You can do all the surgery and stuff. Lung transplants and putting chips in people’s brains.”
Naph lets the silence grow, seemingly unsure of what to say. Finally, he says, “The Defender gets his picture taken a lot. That’s marketing, right?”
He sounds unsure. Amaranthine feels her lips curl up in amusement. “You don’t have to reassure me,” she says. It’s a gentle reminder of who they’re meant to be right now. Mortal enemies face-to-face on the battlefield.
“Right.”
“I think what I’m trying to say is that I’m aware that the only reason I’m swinging this hammer around is because it’s all I have left of Jayce. That’s all. You don’t have to believe in the Glorious Evolution shit, or try to sell it to me, because I get it. I get why you’re doing it.”
Naph bristles. “I do believe–”
“Okay,” Amaranthine interrupts him. “Well, I don’t. I have no fucking idea why Jayce was doing this. What purpose it serves. I think he just wanted an excuse to see the Machine Herald and maybe get his face beat in along the way. And it makes me angry, because now that I’ve met the Herald, he fucking sucks. Sucked, sorry. And I don’t think Jayce was right for keeping him alive, or for keeping him out of prison, or for egging him on to more and more extreme stunts just by virtue of being there. And I wish my father cared more about me than a guy he was friends with for like a month a million years ago, which is a shitty thing to think, but it’s how I feel.” She can feel her voice rising, and tries to push it down.
Naph stares at her, stunned. Then he slowly lowers himself onto a pile of rocks, sitting across from her. Even without the mask, he’s not very expressive. Probably a side effect of growing up with the Machine Herald as a role model. Still, she can see the sweat at his brow and the places where his lips are chapped from biting. He has a lot of freckles. She doesn’t think she ever noticed that before, in the dim light of Zaun’s lower levels.
“He tore himself apart.” At first Amaranthine thinks it’s a metaphor. She’s about to agree that Jayce did the same, but Naph continues. “Everything, I mean. Limbs, organs, voice box. Left it to collect dust in some fucking cave.” Before Amaranthine can ask one of the many questions she has regarding that, he barrels on. “Did you ever notice that they measured time based on each other? Before the Defender, and after the Defender. And then he died and it was– it was after the Defender again, for real this time, and it’s like he decided he had to start over. He couldn’t just grieve like a normal person, he had to rewrite his entire biology in opposition to that grief.”
Amaranthine nods, leaning forward. “He used to cry about him,” she says, which is something she’s definitely not meant to share with anyone, especially not the Herald’s replacement. “I’d hear him at night, in his room. I think he did it in his sleep. Would just say his name over and over. He had a box under his bed, full of all their old patents and papers that they’d co-authored. It was weird as fuck. Like– you’ll go on national radio calling for his execution, then come home and stare at a diagram of a hydraulic motor for an hour.”
Naph is nodding too, about to open his mouth, but Amaranthine still has more she needs to say. If she’s already admitting things she shouldn’t, she might as well go all in.
“He didn’t leave me the title,” she says. “He didn’t want this for me. He hated it. I think he only did it because he thought it was his only option. He left the house and everything in it to me, and that’s where the hammer was. He probably hoped I’d melt it into slag.”
Naph actually looks surprised by this, but he doesn’t ask her why she made the choice she did. It’s pointless. He knows why.
“Viktor would’ve wanted this for me,” he says instead after a moment of hesitation. “I mean, I can’t be sure, because I don’t think he expected to ever die until he was halfway there, but– He was serious about the Glorious Evolution. He believed in it for real, with everything he had. I just don’t think it was enough for him in the end. He needed someone to prove it to, maybe, or maybe he needed the Defender specifically to, like, be shown the error of his ways. I don’t know.”
There’s a frustration in Naph’s voice that Amaranthine knows far too well.
Why wasn’t I enough? If the mission wasn’t enough, why wasn’t I?
The sun is high in the cloudless sky. Birds are flying overhead. It’s too early in the day to admit things like I don’t want to do this, but Amaranthine finds the words on the tip of her tongue despite herself. She can’t ask Naph to put down the mask anymore than she’s willing to loosen her grip on the hammer. But she wishes he would ask. Wishes that she was brave enough to step out of the train and douse the engine.
“What would you do,” she asks instead, “if you weren’t doing this?”
Naph shrugs. He stares up at the sky, at the sun and the birds and ashes that float up from their feet into the air.
“…My sibling works at a hospital,” he says. “We need doctors, down in Zaun. Real doctors. Viktor always said it wouldn’t matter, that once the Evolution took place, the people down there would be saved, and anything else is just prolonging their suffering. I kind of think he’s right, but it’s still– it’s more practical. Helps people now, you know, rather than…”
“Whenever the Glorious Evolution finally catches on.” Amaranthine finishes for him. He nods. He looks guilty, as if he’s admitted something shameful by suggesting that the Glorious Evolution is not mere moments away.
“What about you?” He asks.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t really care about anything. I thought I would care about this– I thought it would feel important.” She doesn’t let herself continue, doesn’t allow herself the words on the tip of her tongue.
It feels gross. It feels exploitative. It feels like the kind of job that makes you want to drink yourself to death.
She is still Jayce’s daughter. She doesn’t have to go speaking ill of the dead so soon, and certainly not to his enemy's– whatever Naph was to the Herald. His enemy’s apprentice, she guesses. Enemy’s coworker. Enemy’s flatmate, even. One thing she learned from Jayce – ignoring the obvious is basically the same as it not being there at all.
Silence extends between them again. Amaranthine is running out of things to say.
“I guess I’ll tell them you got away.” She doesn’t suggest that he fire off a few shots to make it look real – she doesn’t want this to feel like playing pretend anymore than it already does. Doesn’t want to make this into something it isn’t, some kind of alliance or mutually kept secret. She turns around so that she can’t see him, so it won’t be lying when she tells the enforcers that he slipped out of her sight.
Naph doesn’t respond, but she can hear him standing up, his ill-fitting armour clanking against itself. She waits until his footsteps have receded to turn around. She kind of hopes that she never sees him again.
“This wine is awful,” Viktor had told Jayce, lounged across his ratty couch on his second mug full of the stuff. He was lying. Viktor didn’t have a taste for wine – all of it registered exactly the same on his unrefined palette.
Jayce squawked indignantly, shifting up from his place lying on Viktor’s rug to bat at his good leg. “That cost me half a paycheque!” He’d groaned, draping himself across the floor as though faint.
“Is that all I’m worth to you?” Viktor asked. “Half a month’s pay?”
Jayce had peeked an eye open, trying to gauge whether or not they were still joking. When he determined Viktor to be serious, he forced himself up into a wobbly sitting position, cross-legged at the foot of the couch.
“C’mon, V,” he’d said. “How many times do I have to apologize?”
The puppy dog eyes were less effective when Viktor refused to meet them.
“A couple more wouldn’t hurt,” he had responded, tilting his mug of wine back and forth to watch the liquid slosh along the sides. Jayce dragged himself up the couch, resting his face on his forearms directly in front of Viktor’s, and pouted.
“I’m sorry, V, okay? It was really shitty, and–” he shut his jaw with an audible click at Viktor’s glare. He’d already told Jayce that he didn’t want excuses. He didn’t care why Jayce did it. What’s done is done. If Jayce thought he could buy him back with a bottle of wine, he was sorely mistaken. Even on his deathbed, Viktor knew he was worth more than that.
But he wanted to forgive Jayce. Maybe it was the two mugs of wine or his imminent death sentence speaking, but Viktor wanted an excuse. He wanted Jayce to beg for forgiveness and mean it. Wanted him wretched and pious at the foot of Viktor’s altar. The desperation (and the alcohol) lowered his inhibitions, and Viktor found himself reaching forward to cup Jayce’s cheek.
Jayce leaned into the touch, as he always did, eyes open and watery.
He looks like he means it, Viktor thought. He looks like he’d do anything for me.
And if this was a reconciliation, then Viktor was putting off the inevitable.
I’m dying. He practiced saying it in his head first. I am dying. In two years I will be dead.
He didn’t say anything. Just stroked his thumb along Jayce’s cheek, catching on his stubble.
Jayce’s eyes never left Viktor’s. Drinking him in. Like he knew their time was limited.
“The Ferros Clan is buying me out,” he’d said. Viktor had just blinked at him. This was an ongoing dispute, and an unsurprising development. The Giopara’s may have owned his name, but the capital of the Ferros Clan made it near impossible for them not to agree to renting Jayce’s mind out now and again. “It’s a commercial project,” he’d continued. “Diving suits.”
“For mining?” Viktor asked. Not uninterested, just unsure of why he should have been.
Jayce shook his head softly, careful to not dislodge Viktor’s hand. “For cleanup. East side. Removing debris and chemical waste.”
“So that they can mine there in the future.”
Jayce had winced. “Maybe. Does it matter? It still needs to be done.” He reached up and took Viktor’s hands with his own, staring at him with those open, pleading eyes. Tears caught on his waterline, beading on his eyelashes. Obscene. “It’s chemical filtration, Viktor. In Zaun. You know more about this than anyone else here.”
Viktor understood why he was telling him now. A warmth bloomed in his corpse-cold chest. An olive branch.
“I know more about Zaun than anyone here because no one else cares to know,” he’d said, scoffing. He didn’t want to make it easy for Jayce. Make him work for it, he thought. Make him prove himself.
“I care,” Jayce had said. Hook, line, sinker.
But instead of pushing Jayce – instead of questioning why, if he cared so much, was Viktor the one down in the fissures cleaning up after a chem spill while Jayce twiddled his thumbs at the top of his ivory tower – he’d sighed. He gave in. It was so easy to give into Jayce. To believe him when he said that he was sorry, that it would never happen again. Easy to get caught up in his orbit, to let yourself be led by the hand to wherever his frequently outlandish ideas would take you.
“You want my help?” Viktor had asked.
“I just want my partner back,” Jayce responded. Then, a pause. “I told them I wouldn’t work on it if I couldn’t have you.”
It should make the skin on Viktor’s neck prickle and rise. Jayce had clearly already made the decision, and he knew Viktor would be unable to say no to a Ferros paycheque. It should have been taken as an invasion of Viktor’s autonomy, assuming what he’d do before he’d done it. Assuming forgiveness for the unforgivable. From anyone else, it would’ve been.
With Jayce it was different. It was always different. Jayce was needy. Jayce needed Viktor. Jayce came to Viktor’s apartment on his birthday after months of zero contact, having already decided that they would be partners again by the end of the night.
Viktor took Jayce's hand and raised it to his mouth, pressing a wine-damp kiss on his back knuckles, then his palm.
“Okay,” he’d said. An olive branch in return. “Partners.”
He had laid back on the couch and shut his eyes. He would tell Jayce that he was dying tomorrow. He’d see how well the shaky foundations of their once-fractured partnership held up in the sober light of day tomorrow.
Let them have this. One more night where they’d both live forever.