Chapter 110 - Strings - My Life (After Countless Reincarnations) in Runeterra

POV - Morgana

Memories came swiftly this time. Like loose leaves in a gale, each passing close enough for me to see what it carried before being swept away by the next. Flashes. Months compressed into mere instants.

The training courtyard. Winter dissolving into something less cold. Anastasia, eyes closed, motionless, hands open at her sides. No sword. No lightning. Nothing.

And around her fingers, not the usual sparks. Silence. A silence that was not natural, possessing weight and contour, as if the air there had decided to become less.

The void.

More stable than the first time. More intentional. It lasted five seconds before unravelling, and when Anastasia opened her eyes, there was no astonishment in them. There was hunger. The specific hunger of one who has tasted something real and craves more.

Azra'il watched from the veranda. Tea in hand. Ears erect.

"Better," she said. Only that. But her ears said the rest.

Another morning. Warmer. The void at Anastasia's fingertips lasting longer, eight seconds, ten. And then, failing. Not gently. With rage. The sparks returning in an explosion, lightning snapping against the stone: the frustration of one who demands perfection of herself and receives progress instead.

Azra'il did not comment. She stepped down from the veranda. Prepared tea. Placed the cup on the floor beside Anastasia, who sat in the middle of the courtyard with the rigid posture of someone who had lost a battle against themselves.

Anastasia took the cup without looking. She drank and offered no thanks.

This was becoming routine, and both knew it.

Another memory. Azra'il correcting not technique, but something more arduous.

"You are trying to conquer the void." Her voice, casual, from the veranda. "It is not a territory."

"Then what is it?"

"Absence. And absence is not conquered. It is permitted."

The sparks on Anastasia's fingers snapped with the irritation of one hearing something nonsensical yet loathing the inability to understand.

And amidst the training, the tea. Always the tea. Azra'il preparing it on the veranda with the selfsame ritual as ever, and Anastasia sitting on the other side of the kettle without being asked, without commenting, without turning the gesture into anything larger than it was. A silent habit. The language of two people who built a bridge without a blueprint and without an opening ceremony, plank by plank, cup by cup, until one day they realised they were already standing side-by-side.

Then came something different.

Not like the previous memories, not as an image forming itself, with a courtyard and characters and setting building up around it. This time, the memory began with a sound.

First came the sound.

Strings vibrating. Long, soft notes that slid like water over polished stone. Distant at first, growing closer, more present, until the world around me assembled itself around them like a frame around a painting.

Late afternoon. The sky in amber tones reminiscent of autumn in Runeterra; for an instant, longing caught me off guard. It was still Faruk's house. The garden with the last leaves hanging from the branches like those who refuse to admit the season has ended.

And my daughter.

Azra'il stood in the middle of the courtyard, halfway between the house and the garden. Motionless. Not the stillness of one training or meditating. That of one listening.

Her ears were turned toward the veranda of Anastasia's room, tilted with an attention I rarely saw: total attention, without a filter, without the layer of casualness she wore as a second skin. Her eyes half-closed. Her tail hanging behind her, motionless. Shoulders loose in a way that didn't suit someone who carried millennia of weight.

And from the veranda, the sound.

It seemed to be a guzheng. Long strings being plucked with the precision of one who knew the instrument as an extension of their own body. A melody that wasn't a performance; it was a conversation. The kind of music someone plays when they are alone and have no one to impress, when fingers move by memory and will, and the sound produced is more honest than any word.

I noticed, watching my daughter watching the music.

And I knew that fear. The fear of breaking fragile things by existing too close to them.

The melody changed. It grew slower. Heavier. Like a river finding a deeper stretch and growing dark.

And then came the voice.

Anastasia, singing. Low. To herself. Not the projection of a performer, but the intimacy of one who sings as they breathe, without thinking, without deciding. Her voice mingled with the strings like two rivers meeting only to discover they were always the same.

The words arrived in fragments, carried by the courtyard breeze like petals the wind chooses to deliver.

"When somebody loved me... everything was beautiful..."

The voice was different. Not the Anastasia I knew, the one of swords and sparks and pride so high it cast a shadow. This voice did not cut. It did not demand. It did not protect itself. It was the sound of one who only existed thus when there were no witnesses, when music created a space around her where armour could be set aside without anyone seeing the skin beneath.

"...every hour we spent together, lives within my heart..."

I knew not whom she sang of. I knew not what dwelt behind those words, nor what longing it was that gave Anastasia's voice a weight her shoulders never showed. But I needn't know. Certain pains are recognised by their sound, just as one recognises rain by its scent before the first drop falls. And what I heard was longing. Of the ancient kind. The kind that does not diminish with time, that one learns to carry as one carries their own name, so much a part of who we are that we forget it exists until someone asks.

"...and when she was sad, I was there..."

The fragments came and went. The wind took pieces and returned others. But I heard enough to feel the song's shape: a story of someone who was loved and then left alone. Of someone who waited. Of someone who one day, when they no longer believed, was found again.

"...lonely and forgotten... never thought she would look my way..."

And something occurred upon Azra'il's face that made me stop breathing, had I any breath to draw.

She closed her eyes.

My daughter closed her eyes. There. In the middle of the courtyard. Exposed. With Anastasia's voice singing of solitude and waiting, enveloping her like a blanket she had not asked for, yet did not refuse.

And I saw a tear.

One. Singular. Rolling down my daughter's face without her opening her eyes or moving a muscle. Silent as everything that is too true to make a noise. As if her body had decided of its own accord that such music merited a response, and the only one it possessed was this: the oldest, the simplest, the one existing before words and after them, when all the mouth can say has been said and remains insufficient.

Her tail drooped. Her ears fell. Not from sadness, from surrender. The surrender of one who hears something that touches places where millennia of pain had built walls around; and which a voice singing alone on a veranda traversed without effort, as though the walls did not exist. As if they never had.

I saw this and something ancient stirred within me. A memory: the image of my daughter, sitting on the floor of the tea house in Piltover, strumming the guitar I had given her, singing softly to herself on nights she thought she was alone. Whilst we sailed the seas under a starry sky. She would take up the guitar for no apparent reason, and I knew the reason was everything she didn't say. Music had always been there, within my daughter. The silent refuge. The language she used when words, and she always had so many words, so many, sharp, ironic, and brilliant, were not enough.

I always wondered where it came from.

And now, watching my daughter standing in the middle of a courtyard with her eyes closed and a tear drying on her cheek, hearing a woman sing to herself of being loved and losing and waiting and being found, I felt the edge of an answer forming. Not whole yet. Not yet clear. But there. Like a note heard in the distance that one knows will draw near.

The music stopped.

Silence. The kind remaining after sound, emptier than normal silence because the ear still expects.

Azra'il opened her eyes. Her ears pricked up.

And from Anastasia's veranda, the voice, not singing. Speaking. With the dryness of one cutting bamboo:

"If you're going to listen, you could at least stop hiding in the middle of the courtyard like a self-conscious statue."

Azra'il's ears flattened for a fraction of a second, the lupine equivalent of being caught stealing sweets. I nearly laughed.

"I was not hiding," Azra'il said, recomposing her posture with the speed of one who has practised dignity for millennia. "I was preserving the integrity of the performance. An audience too close might unsettle the artist."

"An audience implies an invitation. You invited yourself."

"I positioned myself in a public space during a spontaneous acoustic event. That isn't trespassing. It's passive appreciation."

Silence from the veranda. I imagined Anastasia's eyes narrowing, calculating whether this deserved a response or disdain.

Apparently, it deserved something in between. For Anastasia's footsteps sounded upon the timber, and she appeared at the veranda's edge looking down at Azra'il. The guzheng still in her arms. Her face wearing the expression of one deciding between irritation and something she refused to call amusement.

"How long?"

"Hmm?"

"How long have you been listening?"

Azra'il's ears twitched to the sides: the tic of one calculating the least incriminating answer.

"Define 'listening'."

"Define 'evasive'."

"...A few months."

The sparks on Anastasia's fingers snapped faintly. But her mouth did not downturn. It moved sideways. A fraction of a millimetre that on anyone else would be nothing, but on Anastasia's face was practically a smile of tolerance.

"Months."

"Sound carries. The courtyard's acoustics are excellent. Practically impossible not to hear."

"And the part about standing still with your eyes closed as if in a trance?"

"Meditation. Entirely unrelated."

"Quite."

Another silence. But unlike the silences at the beginning, this one had room to breathe.

"Where did you learn?" Azra'il asked. The casualness in her voice was too thin, too transparent. The curiosity beneath was real.

Anastasia looked at the guzheng in her arms. Her fingers ran across the strings without producing a sound, the gesture of one who touches something by habit, as one strokes the fur of an animal always present.

"My grandmother."

Two words. But her voice changed; just enough. The razor edge she carried in every syllable softened, like a sword returning to its sheath not out of weakness, but for lack of a foe.

"Maternal grandmother. She was a cultivator from the Sect of Celestial Harmony." Anastasia descended the veranda steps with her guzheng, sitting on the engawa, her legs crossed and the instrument in her lap. Not an invitation for Azra'il to draw near. But not a barrier either. "Cultivators of that sect used art in their cultivation. Music, dance, painting. They believed there were ways to cultivate that did not involve accumulating power."

Azra'il approached. Slowly. She sat on the veranda at a respectful distance, close enough for conversation, far enough not to intrude.

"My grandmother used to say that there are cultivators who accumulate power..." Anastasia plucked a note. Long. Soft. "...and cultivators who learn to listen to the world."

The note lingered in the air like a living thing.

"She taught you."

"Guzheng. Flute, among other instruments." Anastasia looked at the strings, not at Azra'il. And her voice grew softer without becoming weak. More honest without becoming vulnerable. As if her grandmother were the only subject in the world where Anastasia's pride allowed her to yield space. "Not as an obligation. As a refuge. She said that after training, the mind needs a place to rest that isn't silence. Because silence, for cultivators, is just another type of accumulation."

I thought.

"She died when I was eighteen," Anastasia said. No transition. No preparation. Like one yanking a dressing off quickly because doing it slowly hurts more. "I keep playing."

Two words. 'I keep playing.' And within them, everything Anastasia would not say, that she missed her, that music was her way of keeping her grandmother close, that each time her fingers touched the strings, a conversation occurred between the granddaughter and the woman who taught her that not everything must be a battle.

Azra'il did not say 'I'm sorry'. She did not offer condolences. Knowing my daughter as I did, what she did was better.

"The acoustics truly are excellent," she said. Quietly. Looking at the courtyard. "I heard every note."

And what was being said, beneath the words, was: 'I heard. I heard it all. And it was beautiful. And I didn't say so before because I was afraid you'd stop.'

Anastasia looked at her. For several seconds. The look of someone translating something and knowing the translation is correct, yet still not deciding whether to accept it.

"My grandmother also said," Anastasia remarked, plucking the strings softly again, "that music exists to say what the mouth cannot. That feelings which don't fit into words survive in music without need of explanation."

And I heard that, and the sound resonated within me like a plucked string. Because that was it. Precisely that. What I saw my daughter doing, in Runeterra, when she played the guitar, on all the nights when pain or joy or solitude or longing were too great for the mouth to contain, it was precisely that. Using music as the language words cannot reach. And the phrase was not Azra'il's. It was a grandmother's who died when the granddaughter was just beginning her adult life. Passed down as heritage. About to be passed down again.

"Teach me."

The phrase left Azra'il's mouth as naturally as asking for salt. Anastasia arched an eyebrow.

"Beg pardon?"