Winning the daft little tournament and, later, giving a free consultation on the art of chaos to two young assassins in a dark alley, had an unexpected and profoundly irritating side effect: I had acquired a fan club. A persistent, silent, and likely lethal fan club with far too much free time and an unhealthy fixation on my non-existent background. Instead of leaving me in peace to decipher Lissandra's suicide mission, they had decided to make my life their new tactical pastime.
The peace in our walled fortress, which I had previously considered empty and sterile, now became something new: expectant. Every creak of the floorboards, every shadow that moved with the wind, was subjected to a new layer of analysis. I knew I was being watched. It wasn't a feeling; it was a fact, courtesy of the constant data feed from Eos in my mind. Their presence was like a low-frequency hum that only I could hear, a constant note of danger beneath the mundane symphony of life in the capital.
"Eos, run a perimeter scan," I ordered mentally, while pretending to read a tome on the migratory patterns of Elnuks.
[Initiating scan… No anomalous magical signatures. No thermal readings outside of standard parameters… No formal hostile presence detected.]
I rolled my eyes at my book.
[Search parameters adjusted. ALERT: Signature 'Talon Du Couteau' detected 112 metres, northwest rooftop. Static. Observation mode.]
Across the living room, Morgana was pruning a Demacian fern that was fighting bravely against the heavy Noxian air. She watched me for a moment, her head tilted, with that irritatingly empathetic perception of hers that was sometimes more accurate than Eos's sensors.
"You're quiet today, Azra'il. Is something in your research troubling you?" Her voice was soft, filled with a concern that made me feel like an actual child, which was both the most uncomfortable and the warmest feeling in the universe.
"No," I replied, turning a page loudly for emphasis. "Just frustrated with the dreadful penmanship of the old empire's cartographers. It looks as if they were taught to write with their feet."
She smiled, a small, gentle smile that I knew meant she didn't believe a word I'd said. "Well, if you need a fresh pair of eyes to decipher anything…" She turned back to her plant, humming a soft tune. For her, the mystery was solved with my answer. For me, the hunt was just beginning. I could feel Talon's 'fresh eye' on me at that very moment, a point of invisible pressure on the back of my neck.
The first sign came the next morning. It was from Talon, I was sure of it. The signature was his style: silent perfection and a message of understated superiority. I went to fetch one of my rarer grimoires from the shelf, a treatise on the crystallisation of reptilian venoms, and noticed it at once. It wasn't out of place. It was… inverted. Placed on the shelf upside down, its spine perfectly aligned with the others.
To anyone else in the world, it would have been invisible. To me, it was like a crude note left on my desk. Eos confirmed the breach, logging a 0.003-micron disturbance of dust particles on the shelf, with no alarms triggered. The message was crystal clear: 'I can enter your sanctuary whenever I please. I can touch your things. And you won't even know I was here.'
Later that day, Morgana found me reorganising the entire library, measuring the distance between each book with a manic precision and weaving new, more complex alarm-runes into the shelves.
"What are you doing, dear?" she asked, amused by my sudden burst of organisation.
"Just… making sure everything is in its proper place," I replied curtly. "I don't like my things being meddled with."
She smiled, that smile of someone who thinks they're dealing with a childish quirk. "It's important to have your own space, I understand. If you need help organising your potions later, just ask."
I just muttered in response. She didn't see an invasion. She saw child's play. The unintentional condescension was almost as irritating as the intrusion itself.
The second sign came two days later, and it bore Katarina's theatrical, provocative signature. I was in the laboratory, at the final stage of a delicate alchemical process to create a truth-serum potion, useful, I imagined, for future conversations with Vorth. The process required a slow, constant heating at a precise temperature for exactly thirty minutes.
With twenty-nine minutes and fifty seconds on the timer, the furnace's heat-rune flickered. The temperature dropped a single degree, for exactly ten seconds, and then returned to normal. It was enough. The potion bubbled violently and turned into a foul-smelling black sludge. A total failure.
I looked up at the small window that overlooked the neighbouring rooftops. For a fraction of a second, I caught a glint on the glass of a distant building. A crimson flash, like a strand of red hair caught in the light. Then it was gone. Katarina.
[Analysis: Energy anomaly detected in the external runic conduit. Cause: high-velocity kinetic impact, resulting in a 9.8-second flow interruption. Projectile signature consistent with the metal of 'Katarina Du Couteau's' daggers.]
The message: 'Your sanctuary is not safe. Your control is an illusion. I can affect your work, your life, from a distance, whenever I choose.'
Morgana entered the laboratory, drawn by the smell of burnt failure. "What happened?"
"Sabotage," I grumbled, tipping the ruined potion into the sink.
"Don't worry, it happens to all of us," she said, placing a hand on my shoulder. "Alchemy is temperamental. Perhaps you're tired. You have seemed a bit… tense lately. Maybe you need another day off."
The suggestion that my failure was due to my own incompetence, and not the interference of a rival assassin, was the last straw.
Tired of being the prey, I decided to become the bait. The next day, I went to the market. I found a bench in a relatively busy square, a spot with multiple approach routes and rooftop observation points. Perfect. Instead of acting nervous, I took out a small, travel-sized board of Shuriman *'ba*, an ancient and brutally complex strategy game. I began to play against myself, moving the carved stone pieces with deliberate concentration.
To any observer, I was just an odd child playing alone. But I knew I had an audience. Eos had already alerted me to the two familiar signatures taking up positions on the surrounding rooftops. And the opening I played wasn't random. It was 'The Scorpion General's Defence', a famous and risky battle manoeuvre used by General Du Couteau in his campaign to subjugate the northern tribes. It was in the history books, a classic of Noxian military doctrine. The message, to the two ghosts I knew were watching me, was a megaphone shouting in their ears: 'I know who you are. I know how your father thinks. I know you're there. Stop hiding and come and play.'
From the window of our house, some distance away, I could feel Morgana's eyes on me. Later, she would mention with a soft sadness that she'd felt sorry for me, a child so bright but apparently so lonely she had to play board games with herself in public. The irony was so thick I could have bottled it and sold it as poison.
My gamble paid off faster than I'd expected. Later that day, the bell at our apothecary door chimed. It was her. Katarina. Alone. Her clothes were simple, but her posture was that of a queen entering a peasant's hovel. Morgana greeted her at the door, her face lighting up with genuine, happy surprise.
"Hello, dear. You're the girl from the festival, aren't you? I'm so glad Azra'il is making friends her own age," Morgana said, with the kind of warmth that would make a petricite golem feel welcome.
Katarina was caught off guard by the warm and unexpected reception, her tense expression faltering for a moment. She just nodded stiffly.
"Azra'il is in the study. You can go on in."
I was waiting, sitting in an armchair, a book open on my lap. The air between me and Katarina instantly became heavy with unspoken tension. But Morgana's presence in the background, tidying vials and looking oddly happy, was an anomaly that completely shattered the atmosphere of an assassins' confrontation.
Katarina approached, her expression hardening again. "Your move on the board today," she said in a low voice, "was a clear message."
"I grew tired of the hide-and-seek," I replied, not looking up from my book. "It's childish."
"My father," she continued, her voice a hiss, "demands to know who you are. Anomalies in his territory are his business. He does not tolerate mysteries."
The threat was clear. And right at that moment, Morgana's presence made itself felt. She came closer with a wooden tray, balancing a steaming kettle and two mugs. There was also a small plate containing what had once, in a previous life, been biscuit dough. Now, they were dark, slightly carbonised shapes that more closely resembled lumps of coal than any sort of confectionery.
"Are you discussing games? Azra'il loves strategy games," Morgana said, her voice calm but with a rare glint of lightness in her violet eyes. She placed the tray on the small table. "Let me introduce myself. My name is Morgana. I still remember your skills at the competition, they were impressive." She gestured to the empty chair. "Would you like some tea?" Then she pushed the plate of black rocks forward with an almost imperceptible hesitation. "I… tried to make biscuits. Gingerbread. I think the heat from the rune-furnace is… a bit uneven."
The scene was surreal. Katarina, the master assassin in training, was completely speechless. The offer of tea and carbonised biscuits had disarmed her more effectively than any spell or blade. It was so mundane, so domestic, and so… terribly executed, that it shattered the entire framework of her reality, which was based on precision and lethality. Her jaw, which had been clenched, went slack. She looked from Morgana, with her clumsy sincerity, to me, with my smirk of pure scorn, and back to the 'biscuits'. She did not know how to process the situation.
[Analysis: Tactical situation compromised by confectionery-based overture. Adversary is cognitively disoriented. Recommend accepting the offer to maintain psychological advantage,] Eos analysed.
I sighed. "She would love some tea, Morgana. Thank you."
What followed was the most bizarre meeting of my long existence. There we were, Katarina and I, sitting at the table with steaming mugs of chamomile tea, while Morgana watched from a respectful distance, a small, hopeful smile on her lips that I was 'socialising' with children my 'own age'. I was trying to maintain a look of calculated threat at Katarina, which was difficult while she was staring at her 'biscuit' as if it were a new and dangerous form of poison.
"So," Morgana said, trying to keep the conversation flowing. "Did you girls have fun at the festival? It seemed quite… intense."
"It was educational," Katarina managed to say, without touching the biscuit.
"Azra'il is always learning," Morgana agreed with a nod. "She has a… curious mind."
The torture lasted for another ten minutes. Finally, Katarina stood, her composure regained. "Thank you for the tea, ma'am," she said to Morgana with a stiff formality. She turned to me. "This isn't over," she whispered, the threat back in her eyes.
"I know," I replied. "Next time, bring your own biscuits."
She left, leaving a tense silence in her wake. As soon as the door closed, Morgana turned to me, her eyes soft with relief.
"She seems like an… intense girl," she said, with monumental understatement. "But it's good to see you interacting with someone, Azra'il. It puts my mind at ease."
I looked at the half-empty cup of tea, at the untouched biscuit Katarina had left behind. I had won the round, flipped the board, and established a new kind of stalemate. But the price was having to sit down for afternoon tea with my juvenile arch-nemesis.
"She is not my friend, Morgana," I sighed, feeling a headache forming. "She is… a complication."
"Every friendship is a little complicated at the start," Morgana replied, with the wisdom of a 'mother' who had absolutely no idea what had just transpired.
And I realised, with a chilling horror, that she was right in a way she would never understand. The most unpredictable and dangerous force I had to contend with in Noxus was not secret cults, nor House Du Couteau, nor even Lissandra's mission. It was Morgana's blind compassion, her motherly concern, and her endless supply of carbonised gingerbread biscuits. And against that, I had no defence whatsoever.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
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I was going to release this chapter on Sunday, but since I got Grand Master today, I decided to celebrate and post one more chapter 🏆