The Watcher kept staring at them.
That had been the situation for long enough that Logan's fear had started turning into irritation.
Ahri had spent most of that time pacing near the edge of the platform.
The Watcher had sealed the entire area with an invisible boundary. Small bits of dust and broken material drifted toward it, touched nothing, and slid sideways as if redirected by a wall made of gravity.
Ahri had tested it twice. Carefully the first time, angrily the second. Neither had worked.
"Take it down," she said again.
The Watcher did not answer.
Ahri pointed at the edge. "The wall. The barrier. Whatever this is. Remove it."
The Watcher watched her.
Logan sat on a broken slab with his elbows on his knees, hands hanging between them. His palms were still a mess. His shoulder burned. His ribs hurt more when he shifted wrong. The Watcher had removed the corruption from his mind, but it had not healed his body.
Ahri turned to him. "Do you think it understands?"
"I don't know."
"I think he is ignoring me."
"That seems likely too."
Ahri's ears flattened.
The Watcher looked from her to Logan, then back again, as if that exchange had been worth recording.
After that, silence settled.
Logan let his head lower for a moment.
Had they handled the Watchers in the Freljord the right way? The question came against his will. The frozen Watchers had been waking. They were too dangerous to leave alone, too powerful to contain forever, too alien to negotiate with. Killing one had created disaster, and killing more too quickly might have spread Void corruption across the region.
So he had cut away the affected space and thrown himself into the Void.
It had worked.
Technically.
He looked around the platform made from the corpse of a dead world and almost laughed.
Yes. Perfect plan. No flaws at all.
What was happening in the Freljord now? Lissandra should be clearing the corrupted region. If the Watcher residue had spread farther than expected, entire settlements might already be gone.
Maybe the whole Federation was preparing for the worst without knowing where he and Ahri were.
The Twin Cities would not sit still.
And Jinx…
Logan closed his eyes briefly.
Jinx would come.
That thought comforted him and terrified him.
And here Logan was, trapped on a platform with a Watcher that seemed more interested in questions than destruction.
That was the other side of it.
This was a chance.
A horrible, absurd, dangerous chance, but a chance. The Watcher in front of them was not behaving like the ones in the stories.
If Logan could understand why, maybe he could learn something no one else knew.
Something useful.
Something that could help them defeat the Void for real.
The Watcher moved.
Logan stiffened.
Ahri stopped pacing at once.
The Watcher extended one hand and touched Logan's jaw with one finger.
The touch was light. It simply touched the lower part of his face, then pulled its hand back.
Ahri stepped closer. "What are you doing?"
The Watcher turned to her and touched her jaw the same way.
Then the Watcher brought its hand in front of itself and made a simple gesture. Fingers opening and closing. A mouth moving.
Logan stared.
Ahri stared.
The Watcher repeated the gesture.
Ahri's expression changed first. Confusion gave way to realization, then to something dangerously close to amusement.
"I think it wants us to talk."
Logan looked at the Watcher. "Talk?"
The Watcher made the mouth gesture again.
Ahri folded her arms. "Yes. That."
"Why?"
"Because it wants to keep observing our nature, probably."
Logan rubbed his jaw where the Watcher had touched him. "That is unsettling."
The Watcher sat in front of them again, expectant in its empty, alien way.
Logan leaned back slightly. "All right. We can use that. We should talk through what we know. The Void, the Watchers, what to do if we get back to Runeterra, how to warn everyone without causing panic."
Ahri stared at him.
"What?"
"That sounds boring."
Logan blinked. "Boring?"
"We are trapped by an incomprehensible being in the Void, exhausted, injured, and possibly one mistake from being erased. Your first idea for conversation is a strategy meeting?"
"Yes."
"Of course it is."
"We need plans."
"We need to survive the next hour."
"Plans help with that."
Ahri pointed at the Watcher. "You do not even know if it is on our side. Are you sure you want to discuss future countermeasures against the Void in front of a possible enemy?"
Logan opened his mouth.
That was a good point.
An annoying point, because he could see in her eyes that she was using a good point to hide a less serious reason.
"You just don't want to talk about tactics."
"I also do not want to talk about tactics."
"Then what do you want to talk about?"
Ahri sat down beside him. The movement was slower than usual, but she still managed to make it look graceful.
"Stories."
"Stories?"
"Like before."
Logan knew what she meant.
Before the Freljord. Before the Watchers. Before the Void. Those times when they had traded pieces of their lives. Some serious, some silly, some half-true until one of them called the other out. Ahri would tell him about old roads, spirit festivals, forgotten shrines, and people whose names she no longer remembered but whose emotions had stayed with her. Logan would answer with stories from his own impossible memories.
It had been one of the ways they learned each other.
"It wants information," Logan said.
"Then a story is information."
"It wants useful information."
"You do not know that."
"I strongly suspect it."
"Maybe it wants to understand us, and plans are not the only part of us worth understanding."
The Watcher spoke.
"Stories."
Logan's entire body went still.
Ahri's eyes widened.
For a moment, neither of them moved. The word had been rough, not because the Watcher had a rough voice, but because it did not seem made for a voice at all. It was a sound forced into meaning. A shape copied from their conversation.
Logan slowly turned toward it.
"You can talk."
The Watcher looked at him.
Ahri's surprise broke into a bright, exhausted smile. "It said stories."
"It repeated the word."
"It said stories."
"It might not know what it means."
"It chose my word, not yours."
"That does not prove anything."
Ahri leaned toward the Watcher, far too pleased. "Stories."
The Watcher answered, "Stories."
Ahri pointed at Logan. "See?"
Logan frowned at the Watcher. "Plans."
The Watcher stared at him.
"Plans," Logan repeated.
A pause.
"Stories," the Watcher said.
Ahri lifted both hands in victory. "There. Decided."
Logan stared at the Watcher for a few more seconds, then sighed.
The Watcher watched him sigh.
Of course it did.
——————
Far away from the platform, deeper in the Void, the armored hunter continued his pursuit.
The one-eyed creature had gained a great distance after escaping the battle. That did not matter as much as it should have. The hunter had marked its presence, its distortion, the particular way it moved through spaces that should not be crossed. Even in the Void, where direction was unreliable and distance behaved like a liar, he could still feel the trail.
He could have closed the gap faster.
He chose not to.
Repeated spatial jumps would drain him too much, and arriving powerless before his prey would only turn persistence into suicide. Better to learn where the creature was going and why it had risked returning with the residue it carried.
The hunter moved through folds of darkness, crossing broken intervals and dead currents that had no name. His armor pulsed faintly with energies stolen, built, and endured across years of war. The weapon at his arm remained ready.
Eventually, he reached the place he had hoped the creature would not go.
The Eye was closed.
The Eye was not like the creature he had followed. It was not a hunter, not a servant. It was something older, deeper, and far closer to the Void itself.
It slept, or did something close enough to sleep that the hunter had learned not to question the difference. He did not approach. He could not. Around it rested multiple entities, each one still, silent, and terrible in its own way. They also seemed dormant.
The hunter had seen the Eye open once.
Nothing good had followed.
He stayed at a distance, and watched.
The one-eyed creature approached with unusual care. Its many pieces, its floating limbs, its central eye, all moved with less arrogance than before. It carried something first, something that was not the violet-black residue.
The Eye absorbed it.
Not matter, the hunter inferred.
Information.
The creature had gathered knowledge and brought it here. Observations. The hunter could not hear the exchange, if there was an exchange at all, but the meaning was clear enough.
Then the creature offered the second thing.
The residue.
The Eye began to absorb it slowly.
The hunter's grip tightened.
A dead fragment, a remnant of something that should not have been allowed to reach this place.
Then the Void trembled.
It was not movement in the normal sense. The tremor passed through space, thought, and instinct at the same time. The hunter felt it in his armor, in his bones, in the old wounds the Void had left inside him.
The Eye opened.
Only slightly.
Almost nothing.
A thin line.
The hunter did not move.
——————
Far away, the rescue team finally cleared the sea of giants Voidborns.
Jinx did not realize she had been holding her breath until her suit reminded her with a quiet warning tone. She ignored it. Behind them, the enormous Voidborns remained in the dark, silent and distant again, though she knew distance meant less here than it should.
Then everything shook.
The tremor passed through her teeth, her chest, and the inside of her skull.
Goldie curled tighter behind them. Bluebell stopped ahead.
Jinx looked into the distance.
A thin purple crescent had appeared in the dark, so narrow it almost looked like a faraway moon.
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