Jinx kept looking at the transformed meep.
"So," she said through the team channel, "we need names."
Vi did not look away from the dark around them. "For what?"
"For the little guys." Jinx pointed at the meep ahead, the one now wearing its strange new form. "That one's got the blue petal thing going on, so I'm calling it Bluebell."
Ekko glanced at her. "Bluebell?"
"It's blue. It has petals. Try to keep up, genius."
"The other one?"
Jinx looked back. The normal meep hovered behind the team, dim and golden now, its light reduced to a careful glow that stayed close to its body.
"Goldie," she decided.
Vi made a small sound. "That's it?"
"What, you want me to call him Lord Glorious Banana Sparkle?"
"Goldie is fine," Vi said quickly.
Ekko looked from the transformed meep to the normal one. "You think that change is what lets it track Logan?"
"Maybe," Jinx said. "Little Bluebell got all fancy, thought about life for two seconds, then started leading like it suddenly knew where to go."
The blue meep kept floating ahead, its small flower-like collar and soft blue-purple glow barely visible in the dark. It moved in a straight line for a while, slow enough for the team to follow, but fast enough that nobody had time to relax.
Then Bluebell turned upward.
It simply changed direction and began rising through the empty dark at a steady angle.
Vi raised one hand slightly, slowing herself. "Why are we going up?"
Kai'Sa stared into the dark above them. Her carapace tightened, ridges lifting along her back. For the first time in several minutes, she sounded genuinely tense.
"Follow the meep," she said. "No noise. No bright lights. Nothing unnecessary."
The team followed Bluebell upward.
For several seconds, there was still nothing. Just blackness, the weak glow of the two meeps, and the soft internal hum of the suits.
Then Bluebell's light touched a surface.
A vast wall appeared in front of them.
Jinx almost cursed, but Vi's hand shot out and caught her shoulder before she could say anything too loud.
The surface was not stone nor metal. It curved away into darkness in every direction, rough and ridged like the inner wall of a cave, except it was suspended in open Void and large enough that Jinx could not see where it ended. The only reason they could see it at all was because Bluebell's faint glow skimmed across it.
Then the wall shifted.
Not much.
A line opened across the structure, wide and deep, revealing a dark gap filled with slow movement.
Jinx's stomach sank.
"That's a mouth," Vi whispered.
Kai'Sa did not look surprised. "Yes."
The structure breathed, or did something close enough. The huge cavernous mouth flexed once, then settled again. It had not noticed them. Or if it had, it did not care.
Vi stared at the immense shape. "How does something like that not see us?"
"To it, we are less than ants," Kai'Sa said.
Ekko looked toward the direction Bluebell had chosen. "That's why Lissandra sent us instead of coming herself."
A being like Lissandra would not be an ant here. Neither would Soraka. Even Janna would shine too brightly. Anything powerful enough to fight back would be powerful enough to attract attention.
They were alive because they were small.
Jinx hated that.
Bluebell continued upward, guiding them along the edge of the enormous Voidborn. Goldie stayed behind them, turning every few seconds as if making sure the team kept tight formation.
After a few minutes, Kai'Sa stopped again.
This time she did not need to speak before Jinx understood.
Ahead of them, more shapes waited in the dark.
Bluebell was already changing course.
The faint light brushed across distant surfaces, and the team saw pieces of them one at a time. A curved back larger than a building. A limb as wide as a bridge. A mouth half-open in sleep, if Voidborn even slept. Another body floated farther away, folded around itself like a mountain-sized insect.
There were many of them.
Not one cavernous horror, but a field of them, scattered through the darkness like predators resting at the bottom of an ocean.
"Stay close," Kai'Sa whispered.
As Jinx drifted between those mountains of teeth and hunger, one thought kept scratching at the back of her mind: where were all of them going?
—————
Logan watched the Watcher shape the next Voidborn.
It was taking longer than before.
The first creature had formed quickly, ugly and functional, as if the Watcher had pulled a rough weapon out of the Void and thrown it at him. This time, the purple essence moved more slowly. It folded inward, stretched, paused, then folded again. The Watcher's hand remained lifted, its single cyan eye fixed on Ahri.
Logan stood behind her, still injured, still aching from the fight. His hands were torn. His ribs hurt when he breathed. His shoulder had not stopped bleeding completely, though the flow was slower now.
Ahri did not look much better.
No, that was too generous. She looked worse.
"Ahri," Logan said quietly. "Draw some spiritual power from me."
She did not turn around. "No."
"What? Why?"
"The answer is obvious."
The Watcher continued shaping the creature. It did not react to their conversation.
Logan took one step closer to her. "You need power."
"If I pull too much from you, your spiritual balance could collapse." Ahri's voice was tight. "You are only staying clear because you are holding the exact amount you can control. If I disturb that, the Void gets in again."
"The range is wider now."
That made her glance back.
Logan lifted his injured hands slightly. "I felt it after the Watcher removed the corruption. I don't know if it's because I got used to fighting while holding the balance, or because that thing changed something around me. Maybe both. But the margin isn't as narrow as it was."
Ahri's eyes hardened. "You are guessing."
"I'm always guessing here."
"... no."
She turned forward again, ending the discussion as if that would be enough.
Logan sighed through his nose.
Then he started the process himself.
It was careful at first. A thin pull from his own center, guided through the connection between them. He did not shove power into Ahri. He let it move, slow and steady, like opening a valve one degree at a time.
The Void pressed against him immediately.
But it did not break through.
He adjusted. Less from the left side of the connection. More from the spiritual flow near his chest. Not too much through the damaged parts of his mind. He felt the balance shift, wobble, then settle again.
Ahri spun around.
"Logan."
She was angry. Not dramatic, but genuinely angry in the way that meant she was scared.
"I'm fine," he said.
"You do not get to decide that alone."
"You made a promise to protect me."
"I did."
"You can't do that if your power runs out."
For a moment, she had no answer.
The connection between them carried the things she did not say. Frustration. Worry. The stubborn desire to refuse him even now. Under that, something softer, because she knew he was right.
Finally, Ahri closed her eyes and drew in a slow breath.
"Thank you," she said.
"You can yell at me later."
"I will."
She gave him one sharp look, but there was no real bite in it.
The power Logan gave her was tiny compared to Ahri's full power. At her true strength, Ahri could burn through armies of strong creatures. This amount was nothing by those standards.
But Ahri was Ahri.
Even with very little, Logan believed she could turn it into one clean strike. One flame. One kill.
Then the Watcher finished.
The Voidborn in its hands was small.
Logan blinked.
Compared to the last one, it almost looked harmless. Still humanoid, still wrong, but less grotesque. It had two arms, two legs, and a normal head shape, though its body was too thin and its skin carried the same purple-black Void sheen as the others. It was smaller than a human, closer to a yordle in height, but not yordlelike in any other sense.
It did not attack.
The Watcher sat down.
It held the little Voidborn in front of itself and looked at Ahri.
Ahri slowly approached, stopping several steps away.
"What is this?" Logan asked.
The Watcher did something with its hands.
It was hard to see. A slight pressure. A twist in the purple essence around the creature. The small Voidborn shrieked.
Ahri flinched.
Logan did too.
The sound was thin and ugly, but it was pain. There was no mistaking that.
The Watcher stopped.
The little Voidborn trembled in its hands.
Ahri looked back at Logan.
He stared at the Watcher, confused.
The Watcher repeated the motion.
The Voidborn shrieked again.
Ahri's ears lowered slightly. Her tails stiffened behind her.
A few seconds passed.
The Watcher did it again.
This time Ahri's fingers curled.
Logan spoke quietly. "It's watching you."
"I know."
"Maybe it wants you to kill it."
"Then it would make it attack."
The Watcher repeated the process.
Another cry.
Ahri took half a step forward. "What do you want?"
The Watcher did not answer.
Again.
The Voidborn's small body jerked.
Ahri's expression changed from confusion to anger.
"Stop that."
The Watcher looked at her and did it again.
The shriek was louder.
Ahri's voice rose. "Stop it."
Nothing changed.
The Watcher continued every few seconds, precise and patient, as if pressing the same point in an experiment to see whether the result remained consistent.
Ahri snapped.
"Stop!" she shouted directly into the Watcher's face. "Can't you see it hurts?"
Logan stared at her.
She was exhausted. Almost empty. A few minutes ago, she had cried because the Watcher's threat had made it clear that if she interfered, Logan would be erased. Now she was yelling at that same being because it was hurting a small Voidborn.
He should have been terrified for her.
He was.
But he also smiled.
Because that was Ahri.
The Watcher's eye shifted.
It extended one hand toward Logan.
A sharp pain stabbed through his foot.
"Fuck!"
Logan dropped to one knee, grabbing his leg on instinct. There was no wound. No blood. Nothing broken. Just pain, clean and sudden, as if the Watcher had reached into the idea of his foot and pinched the nerves directly.
Ahri moved before he could stop her.
She grabbed the Watcher by the shoulders.
"You miserable little, no, not little, whatever you are, don't touch him!" she shouted. "Do you understand me? Don't you dare use him like that, you empty-eyed, overgrown nightmare, I will burn whatever passes for your soul if you have one, and if you do not, I will find something else to burn!"
Logan forgot about his foot for a second.
The Watcher did nothing.
Ahri kept going.
"You want a reaction? There. That is the reaction. Hurt him again and I swear I will make the mistake of trying to kill you even if it kills us both!"
Logan stared at her hand still gripping the Watcher.
She had no fear now. Or rather, the fear was still there, but buried under anger so immediate that it had no room to guide her. The same Ahri who had been shaking under the threat of Logan's erasure was now insulting a Watcher to its face.
"Ahri," Logan said carefully. "Calm down."
She turned on him. "It hurt you."
"I know."
"It hurt you on purpose."
"I know."
Her grip tightened.
Logan forced himself to stand. "That's the point."
Ahri glared at the Watcher again, breathing hard.
Logan looked at the small Voidborn still trembling in its hands. Then at his own foot. Then at Ahri.
"It's trying to understand pain," he said. "Not just the feeling. The reaction. Empathy."
Ahri did not let go. "By hurting things."
"It may not understand another way."
The Watcher continued to stare at them.
Logan took another breath. "But I don't think it knows what we are reacting to. Not really."
Ahri looked back at the small Voidborn.
Her anger did not disappear. It changed shape.
Slowly, she released the Watcher's shoulders.
Then she pointed at Logan like she was scolding a child and the Watcher happened to be the child.
"When something bad happens to him, it feels as if it happens to me," she said. "Sometimes worse. Because I can see it. Because I care. Because I do not want him to suffer."
The Watcher remained still.
Ahri pointed at the Voidborn in its hands.
"With that little monster, no, I do not feel the same thing. I do not know it. I do not love it. If it attacked Logan, I would burn it. But watching you make it suffer for no reason still bothers me. It is alive enough to feel pain, and you keep hurting it just to see what I do."
The Watcher looked at the small Voidborn.
Then at Ahri.
Then at Logan.
It raised its hand again.
This time the pain struck Ahri.
"Fuck!"
She stumbled, one hand going to her side. Logan moved to catch her, but she waved him off immediately, more offended than injured.
Logan stared at the Watcher, then at Ahri's furious face.
He laughed.
He could not help it.
Ahri looked at him as if he had betrayed her.
"It is not funny."
"It's a little funny."
"That hurt!"
"I know." Logan sat down beside her, partly because his legs were shaking and partly because the situation had become too absurd to face standing. "And I feel the same way you do."
Ahri's anger softened a little.
Logan looked at the Watcher. "When she suffers, I suffer. Not in the same nerves. Not the same wound. But it matters to me because she matters to me. That feeling is part of what makes beings like us different."
The Watcher's single eye stayed on him.
Logan continued, slower now.
"We don't only react to our own damage. We react to what happens to others. The closer they are to us, the stronger it gets. Sometimes it makes us stupid. Sometimes it makes us brave. Sometimes both."
Ahri sat beside him, still breathing hard, still glaring at the Watcher, but she did not interrupt.
The small Voidborn stopped trembling. The Watcher no longer pressed pain into it. It simply held the creature, as if it had temporarily forgotten what the thing was for.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
Logan thought about how ridiculous this was.
He was sitting on a platform made from the corpse of a world, wounded and exhausted, explaining empathy to a Watcher while Ahri glared at it like it was a misbehaving student. Somewhere in the distance, a rift into the Void turned silently. Around them, creation itself had been broken into pieces.
And yet this might matter.
A Watcher that wanted to understand rather than simply destroy should not exist. At least, not according to what Logan knew. Maybe its curiosity would become something worse.
But maybe it was also a key.
If one Watcher could learn something beyond hatred of existence, then the Void was not as simple as anyone believed. If it could be made to understand pain, care, and connection, then perhaps the answer to the Void was not only weapons, seals, and sacrifice.
Perhaps this strange, terrifying being in front of them was the first crack in something much larger.
The Watcher looked from Logan to Ahri again.
This time, Logan thought, it looked less empty.
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