Ahri stood between two worlds.
One was Logan's mind.
The other was the Void.
She was not inside his memories as deeply as before. Her forehead was no longer pressed to his, and most of her focus had returned to the platform, the barrier, the army outside, and the strange armored man Logan had called Kassadin. Still, the connection between them remained open enough for pieces of Logan's inner world to reach her.
It made the contrast almost unbearable.
In Logan's memories, a river in Ionia moved beneath a bridge covered in leaves. Sunlight touched the water in broken gold. Somewhere nearby, chimes moved in the wind. The Watcher observed it all through Logan's mind, silent and unreadable.
Outside, a Voidborn slammed its jaws against the gravitational field.
The invisible barrier did not break. Its body bent around the pressure instead, then snapped back with a wet crack. Another creature crawled over it, stabbing hooked limbs into empty air, trying to find a seam that was not there.
Inside Logan's memories, the scene shifted.
Now there were glaciers.
The Freljord stretched below them, white and blue beneath a sky so clear it looked too sharp to be real. Logan showed the Watcher distant tribes moving like dark threads over snow, smoke rising from shelters, children wrapped in furs chasing one another between tents.
Outside, Kassadin tore through three Voidborns in a line.
His blade flashed. A creature with a plated skull tried to crush him from above, but he vanished before it landed and reappeared beside its neck. One strike opened it. Another ended it.
However, there were too many. Far too many.
Ahri could feel the cost in the rhythm of his movements.
Consumption.
If he lost, it would not be because those creatures were better than him. It would be because he eventually ran out of power, the same way she had nearly run out. The Void only needed to keep coming.
A memory of Bilgewater began to form inside Logan's mind. She caught only fragments, salt wind, wooden docks, sea lanterns, drunken singing, sailors laughing too loudly because the night was too dangerous to spend quietly.
Then the roar came.
Ahri's body went cold.
The sound did not simply travel through the Void. It forced itself through everything. Through the barrier. Through her bones. It was huge, furious, and wrong, carrying the weight of something that had been broken and remade with hatred as its first breath.
Every Voidborn stopped.
All of them.
The ones attacking the field froze with claws still raised. The ones fighting Kassadin stopped mid-lunge. Even the distant swarm seemed to halt, as if the army had heard a command older than hunger.
Kassadin reacted instantly.
He appeared near the barrier and began killing the Voidborns closest to it. No hesitation. In the few seconds while they remained paralyzed, he cut them down one after another, clearing space around the platform.
Ahri heard him curse.
"Damn it," Kassadin said. "It finished rebirthing."
Ahri turned toward him. "What finished?"
Kassadin did not look away from the direction of the roar. "Whatever you are doing to convince that Watcher, do it faster."
Then the sound came again.
This time it did not stop.
The roar stretched across the Void in one continuous pressure, rising and falling like a storm given a throat.
Ahri stepped toward Logan.
He stood still beside the Watcher, eyes unfocused, mind far from the platform. In the layer she could still sense, he was showing the Watcher a harbor, markets, ships, people gambling in alleys and praying over cheap charms before going out to sea.
"Logan," she said.
No answer.
"Logan."
His awareness brushed hers.
"I heard it, he said through the connection, though his physical mouth did not move."
"Something dangerous is coming."
I know.
"..."
"If I show fear, if I rush, the Watcher may not understand what I need it to understand. I have to do this calmly."
Ahri clenched her hands.
"For now, we trust Kassadin."
She looked at the armored man outside the field.
"He is the greatest anti-Void specialist alive, Logan continued."
Then his focus slipped back into the memory.
Ahri hated him for a moment.
Then the roar grew louder.
Kassadin stopped killing Voidborns.
Not because the creatures were paralyzed. He ignored them. His whole body had turned toward the approaching sound.
The Voidborn no longer mattered to him.
Whatever was coming was worse than all of them.
Kassadin stood in front of the platform.
"Damn it," he muttered. "It is coming straight in. I hope all those casts gave me enough charge."
His gauntlet lifted.
Purple energy gathered in front of him, compressed into a wide force pulse before anything appeared. The air, if there was air, bent around it. The field spread outward from his arm in a controlled arc, humming with stored power.
Ahri did not understand why he used it so early.
Then she saw the comet.
It came so fast that sight arrived too late.
A fuchsia streak tore through the Void, not flying so much as collapsing the distance between itself and the platform. The light around it was violent, red-violet at the edges, burning hot enough in meaning that Ahri felt her spiritual senses recoil.
It was a creature.
Power filled its shape so completely that details became useless. Ahri could not measure it. She could only understand direction.
It was aimed at Logan.
Kassadin had fired the Force Pulse before the creature became visible because waiting until he saw it would have meant waiting too long.
The impact struck.
For one second, the Void became purple and fuchsia.
Kassadin's Force Pulse caught the charge head-on, and Ahri knew at once it could not hold. Not for long. Not against that speed, that mass, that fury. The energy field screamed under the pressure. Ten seconds would have been impossible. Five felt generous.
But Kassadin was not trying to stop it.
He angled the pulse.
A fraction.
The fuchsia creature slammed against the slanted force, and the direction of its charge shifted. Barely. Almost not enough. Kassadin's armor sparked. The pressure drove him backward, one arm shaking, the purple field tearing apart at the edges.
Then the comet veered.
It missed the center of the platform.
The gravitational field distorted. The invisible wall bent inward, not breaking, but warping under a force it had not been made to accept from that angle. A strip of the platform vanished in the creature's wake.
No explosion.
No debris.
Just absence.
Ahri stared.
Five meters from where she and Logan stood, the platform ended in a clean, impossible gouge. The creature had not merely struck material away. It had taken the space where material had been and dragged it into ruin.
If Kassadin had not deflected it, Logan would have been gone.
Not injured.
Just... gone.
Ahri could not breathe.
For the first time since Kassadin had appeared, he looked damaged. Red-violet light crawled over one side of his armor before fading. His left arm hung lower than before.
"Your boy had better hurry. It will come around again soon."
Ahri looked at Logan.
He was still standing in front of the Watcher.
Still calm.
Or pretending to be.
She wanted to drag him out of his own mind and shake him.
But she felt the thin, steady pressure of his will through the connection.
He had heard everything.
He knew.
And still, he continued.
——————
Inside Logan's mind, Bilgewater spread beneath him.
He showed the Watcher ships cutting through dark water, taverns glowing with bad decisions, dockworkers hauling cargo under rain, bounty hunters arguing over coin, priests whispering prayers to the sea, and people who laughed because tomorrow was never promised.
Then Logan felt it.
A presence.
A pressure.
A death that was not death yet, but carried the memory of one.
It reminded him of the moment the giant deer-shaped Watcher had died.
Only this was worse.
Far worse.
That death had been a collapsing mountain.
This was the mountain returning with teeth.
//Check out my P@tre0n for 10 extra free chapters //[email protected]/Razeil0810