"Wisteria, you wanted to see me." Jarvan IV said as the leader of the MageSeekers walked into his office.
"King Jarvan." Wisteria's voice carried the particular weight of someone who had been holding something back for too long. "This has gone on far enough."
"What are you referring to, Wisteria?"
"Granting the mages of Terbisia amnesty," Wisteria began.
Jarvan's eyes sharpened. "Amnesty?"
"What else could one call it? They are criminals. Rebels who rose against the crown." Wisteria's jaw tightened. "Nothing but traitors, the lot of them. And you are allowing this foreigner entirely too much power, my king."
"I doubt many still see him as a foreigner," Jarvan replied evenly. "Not after everything he has done for this kingdom. Need I remind you that the Harrowing is still fresh in everyone's memory."
"That is precisely why we must act now." Wisteria stepped forward. "The Harrowing showed us exactly why magic is dangerous. Why it has always been dangerous. It is the source of all evil, my king. We cannot afford to forget that."
"Calm yourself, Wisteria."
"I cannot be calm." Wisteria's voice rose despite itself. "Not while I watch Demacia being corrupted before my very eyes."
"Demacia is not being corrupted."
"But it is." Wisteria cut across him without hesitation. "Can you not see it? Even now, Terbisia celebrates. Rebels and traitors and criminals, celebrating in the streets as though their king has lost his mind entirely."
"Mind your next words very carefully," Jarvan said, his voice dropping low.
"What else would I call it?" Wisteria pressed on. "When you extend mercy to the very people responsible for so much death and destruction. For the death of your father, the late King Jarvan III."
"Lux and her refugees had nothing to do with that," Jarvan replied, steel threading through every word. "Sylas is the enemy. Sylas alone."
Wisteria's expression shifted into something that looked almost like pity. "Such naivety is beneath you, my king." A pause. "Luxanna Crownguard helped Sylas escape in the first place. She and the king killer have been working together from the very beginning."
"I will not stand for this slander against the Crownguards." Jarvan shot to his feet. "They have been nothing but loyal retainers to this crown for generations."
"That was before one of them was tainted by magic." Wisteria's voice was almost gentle, as though she were explaining something to a child. "Why can you not see this? Demacia is in danger because you are allowing magic to thrive within its borders. We must end this before it is too late. Simply give the order."
"And invite the wrath of quite possibly the strongest mage alive down upon us?" Jarvan's eyes hardened. "That would be the doom of us all."
"Not necessarily." Something shifted in Wisteria's expression. A quiet, careful satisfaction that had clearly been waiting for precisely this moment. "You see, we have a plan for the foreigner. When he used his sword to veil the kingdom, we were able to study it. We now possess the means to eradicate this plague from our lands."
A short laugh escaped her.
"You are beginning to sound unhinged, Wisteria," Jarvan said, a growing unease settling in his chest despite himself.
"Unhinged? Me?" Wisteria's voice sharpened. "The ones losing their minds are you and everyone else in this kingdom. Welcoming a demon into your lands. Letting mages walk free after everything they have wrought. You cannot even avenge your own father." She held his gaze without flinching. "He would be ashamed of you. Ashamed of how far Demacia has fallen under your watch."
"I know with absolute certainty that you are wrong." Jarvan's hand closed around his spear. "Your grudge against Sylas has consumed you. It is clouding everything."
"You think this is about Sylas?" Wisteria laughed, and there was nothing pleasant in it. "You truly have no idea, do you?" Her head tilted slightly. "What a useless king you have turned out to be. You have no control within your own kingdom. The High Marshal and the foreigner might as well declare themselves rulers and be done with it."
Her lips curved into something that was not quite a smile.
"All hail King Jarvan. King of nothing."
Jarvan had heard enough.
He vaulted over his desk, spear in hand, and swung directly for her neck.
The blade never reached her.
A wave of light erupted outward from Wisteria, sudden and violent, hurling Jarvan backward. He crashed into his desk with enough force to splinter the edge, wood cracking beneath the impact.
The doors slammed open.
Guards poured in, among them several members of the Dauntless Vanguard, their hands already on their weapons as they took in the scene. "My king, are you alright? We heard..."
"Arrest her!" Jarvan roared.
The Dauntless Vanguard moved before the words had fully left his mouth, launching themselves at Wisteria in the span of a single breath. Every bit the legend they were rumoured to be.
It didn't matter.
Wisteria didn't even bother to move. She simply stood there as the Dauntless Vanguard closed the distance, and light erupted from her a second time.
It poured outward from her in every direction at once, filling the office like a second sun, and every soldier caught in it was hurled off their feet simultaneously, bodies slamming into walls and doorframes and each other with the kind of force that left men still rather than scrambling.
The light faded.
The office was very quiet.
Wisteria smoothed the front of her coat with one unhurried hand.
Jarvan pushed himself upright from the wreckage of his desk, one hand braced against the splintered wood, his spear still in his grip. Blood ran from a cut above his brow. He didn't wipe it away.
"What have you done?" he asked.
It came out quieter than he intended. Less like a king and more like a man who had just understood that the ground beneath him was not what he had believed it to be.
Wisteria tilted her head slightly. "What Demacia has made me," she said. "What was always needed to be done." Her eyes moved across the fallen soldiers without particular feeling.
"Stand down now Wisteria before it's too late," Jarvan said.
The word landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
Wisteria's expression didn't change. "I have become a weapon," she said simply. "Forged for a singular purpose. One that your father understood, even if you never could."
Jarvan's jaw tightened. "Do not speak of my father."
Wisteria moved toward the door with the unhurried ease of someone who had already decided how this conversation ended. "He was a practical man. He understood that some things must be sacrificed for the sake of the kingdom. That idealism is a luxury that kings cannot afford." She paused at the threshold, turning back to look at him over her shoulder. "You inherited his crown. It is a great pity that you did not inherit his clarity."
Jarvan launched himself forward.
Wisteria was already through the door.
By the time Jarvan reached the corridor, it was empty in both directions.
He stood there breathing hard, blood still running from his brow, his spear gripped in a hand that hadn't stopped shaking since the light hit him.
Behind him, one of the Vanguard groaned and began to push himself upright.
Jarvan turned back into the office. "Send for Garen," he said quietly, to no one in particular.
One of the Vanguard, still pulling himself to his feet, answered immediately. "At once, my king."
Jarvan didn't turn from the window.
"And find out," he said, "everything that the MageSeekers have been up to." A pause. "Everything."
---
The loud explosion from the far wall told Luxanna that Mira had already begun her battle against Shyvana.
She hoped Mira was alright. Which was not something she could say for herself.
As a matter of fact, Luxanna was seriously beginning to wonder how she was supposed to measure up to these people.
She had thought herself strong. Capable. She had protected Terbisia from harm for an entire year, against MageSeekers and the monsters of the forest alike. She had made difficult decisions. Carried impossible weight.
She had even taken lives. Luxanna Crownguard was no longer the girl she had been a year ago.
And yet she was beginning to suspect that it wasn't nearly enough.
The match had started with a literal explosion.
The moment Asta's hand had dropped, Shyvana had appeared directly in front of them. With no wind up or warning. She had simply been somewhere else and then she was there, close enough to touch, and Luxanna had not reacted at all. Not even slightly.
Mira had reacted though and she had done so by blowing up the half dragon.
Luxanna had stood there and nearly died by proximity.
The Black Bulls were monsters. Every single one of them.
And now Luxanna was getting thoroughly beaten by one of them.
She had broken toward the crowd line the moment the smoke covered her, hoping that her familiarity with Terbisia's streets would give her some kind of advantage.
It hadn't.
Luxanna leaned against a tree, catching her breath. She raised her staff and swept the light around her in a slow arc.
No illusions.
That was surprising. More than surprising.
How was she in a forest?
She traced back the last few minutes in her mind. She had shot down, dodged, and trapped every creature that had appeared in her path, each one confirmed through what Mira had told her about Emilia's methods. Illusions. All of them.
And her light had worked. It had cut through every single one cleanly, exactly as Mira had predicted it might.
Yet somehow, despite all of that, Emilia had still led her here. Into the forest. Without Luxanna noticing the transition even once.
The clink of chains was the only warning she got.
Luxanna threw herself sideways. A long red chain drove through the air where her head had been and punched straight through the trunk of the tree she had been leaning against, clean through the wood as though it weren't there.
She landed, rolled, came up with her staff already raised.
More chains erupted from the empty air around her, converging from multiple directions at once.
Luxanna reacted instantly. Light exploded outward from her staff, forming a bubble around her body in the span of a single breath.
The chains struck it from every angle simultaneously.
And found nothing. Bouncing away without purchase, their momentum spent entirely against the barrier.
The chains retreated.
Luxanna kept the bubble up, turning slowly inside it, her light sweeping outward through the trees in every direction. The forest was still. No movement. No sound beyond the distant, muffled roar of the crowd back at the training ground and the occasional boom that told her Mira was still fighting.
Still standing, at least.
She hoped.
"Your light is quite something."
Luxanna turned toward the voice.
Emilia stood at the edge of the treeline, perhaps twenty feet away, her hands clasped loosely in front of her. She looked entirely unbothered. Not a strand of hair out of place. Not a single suggestion that she had spent the last several minutes herding Luxanna through half of Terbisia without her noticing.
"You led me here," Luxanna said.
"Of course," Emilia replied. "The crowd was a complication. Too many variables." A slight tilt of her head. "I prefer cleaner conditions."
"Your light dissolves illusions," Emilia said, resuming as though the pause had not happened. "It does so instinctively, which means you do not have to think about it. That is the more troubling quality. A conscious ability can be baited. An instinctive one cannot." She unclasped her hands. "It also forms barriers of considerable density, as I observed earlier. And it moves quickly. More quickly than I would have expected from someone self taught."
"Is this your way of paying me a compliment?" Luxanna asked.
"It's me giving you a boon to realise your defeat ," Emilia replied.
The chains erupted again without warning, a dozen of them this time, tearing out of the shadows between the trees from angles that the bubble couldn't cover simultaneously. Low, high, from the sides, from directly above.
Luxanna was already moving.
She dropped the bubble entirely and threw herself into motion, light bursting from her staff in concentrated beams that she swept across the chains in rapid succession. Where her light touched them they recoiled, pulling back into the shadows.
'They're real,' she realised, landing hard against a root and pushing off immediately. 'Not illusions. The chains are real.'
She filed that away and kept moving, weaving between the trees, using the trunks as cover, sending bursts of light in every direction to keep the chains at distance.
Emilia tracked her without hurrying.
"You fight well for someone who spent a year hiding," she said, her voice carrying through the trees with an ease that suggested she was not remotely concerned about giving away her position.
"I spent a year surviving," Luxanna replied, sending a wide beam of light sweeping through the treeline to her left. "There's a difference."
"Indeed." A pause. "And yet you are doing still what you did the last year. Running."
Luxanna stopped, a furrow on her brow.
She turned to face the direction the voice had come from, her staff held in both hands, light gathering at its tip in a slow deliberate build that she did not try to hide.
"You want me to stop running," she said.
"What i want," Emilia said, stepping out from between two trees directly ahead, her red chains coiling slowly around her wrists like something alive, "You couldn't possibly begin to fathom." Her eyes dropped briefly to the light building at Luxanna's staff tip, then rose back to her face. "That, however, is more promising."
Luxanna let the light go.
It wasn't a beam. It wasn't a burst. It was her ultimate. Her greatest act of defiance. The culmination of all of her existence into one destructive expression.
It was everything at once, pouring outward from her in a wave that lit the entire forest like midday, bleaching shadow from every corner, every hollow, every space between the trees where something might have been hiding.
The chains recoiled violently, every single one of them simultaneously, pulling back from the light with a sound like a sharp inhale.
It didn't matter how strong any of the Black Bulls were. This was an attack that demanded caution from all of them. One Emilia had to dodge, and one Luxanna was ready to capitalize on.
Emilia tilted her head, the faintest smile touching her lips as the blast tore through her.
Her form flickered and dissolved like smoke caught in wind.
Unfortunately, Emilia's form was not the only illusion Luxanna's light had burned through.
The trees around her began to flicker as well. One by one, then all at once, their shapes stuttering and fading at the edges before dissolving entirely.
"What?" Luxanna took a step back, genuinely thrown. "It couldn't have been an illusion. I checked."
She had checked. She had been certain.
She was wrong.
The forest melted away in pieces, shadow giving way to stone, bark and root replaced by walls and ceiling and the stale air of an enclosed space. When the last of it faded, Luxanna was standing inside a building.
A scorched hole gaped in the far wall where her blast had burned clean through it.
"How did she do this?" Luxanna asked, to no one in particular.
No one answered.
A low groan ran through the structure around her, deep and resonant, the sound of something that had already decided what it was going to do next. The foundation, burned through by her own attack, began to give way.
The building started to come down.
Luxanna slammed her staff against the ground and the bubble snapped into place around her an instant before the ceiling collapsed.