Chapter Text
You still remember the day you lost everything to the cosmic workings of the universe and the first time you questioned the First Star’s guidance. Piltover Academy prepared you to shoulder homework assignments, late night projects, and the occasional coffee run, not intergalactic warfare.
The masks were supposed to protect their identity, casting a veil of vague uncertainty whenever you got close enough to make out facial details to obscure anything pertinent. Uniforms were for the same purpose, just another thing to keep your work strictly professional.
Of course, you figured them out anyways.
It wasn’t hard once you really thought about it. The obscure names you’d given them–another responsibility given by the First Star–did little to make it any harder, and after a year or so of working together you had it all uncovered.
Forge was the easiest. He’d always had such specific mannerisms and tendencies that it was impossible to overlook the glaring resemblance to Jayce Talis, the fourth year in the public safety department. You’d taken several classes with him and manned the info booth for the major, though he was brought on to speak about the homeland security concentration, while you were there for emergency management.
Even if your schedule hadn’t been so entwined with Jayce’s, you’d probably have figured him out regardless. You admired him. Really. He was a brilliant man with an equally brilliant drive to do well; a habit you’d recognized in the two years of working with him both in school and as guardians. But, he did have a tendency to put his brilliant attention quite literally everywhere. Jayce recognized his faults, albeit sometimes too late, but he always worked to mend them. Just a couple weeks prior he’d nearly slammed an enemy straight into another teammate with his hammer, but managed to defeat the cosmic squid so fast that Lamb was really in no danger at all.
Actually, without Forge you would’ve likely never figured out that Lamb was the fourth year president of the political science service organization, Mel Medarda. Thanks to Jayce’s quite overt pining as both himself and Forge, you never in a million years could have guessed that such a striking and poised woman would ever have a name so passive. You honestly nearly asked to change it on the spot, but she insisted it was alright.
It was a small team, but for Star Guardians that was a good thing. The kind of power the Guardians possess wasn’t meant for this world. Even if the stars burn bright, it was only a matter of time before they eventually burned out. There have been too many burnouts recently, you knew that all too well. There was no concrete number of how many Guardians were out there but what you did know was that they operated out of Valoran. Well, used to. Once too many Guardians become active they completely die out in a brilliant supernova. Then the First Star selects someone new to take their place.
It’s nice to feel wanted in that way, but the feeling is fleeting once you remember the sacrifice that brought you the Oath. It was like marrying a cheater, knowing you’ll be next. The cheater in this case being the First Star, you supposed.
“I’m a cheater?”
“What?”
“No, I’m asking.” Forge flicked a bit of lettuce onto your open journal as he tore off the paper lining of his sandwich. “Is that what you said?”
You brushed off the bit of food and grimaced at the soggy stain it left on your notes. “No, I’m saying that’s what it’s like. You know, to be a Guardian?”
He hummed and shrugged. “I don’t cheat on Lamb.”
“I meant the First Star.”
Forge looks up from the sandwich in concern. “I don’t cheat on the First Star either…”
“Jayce!”
“What?!”
You groaned, burying your head into the journal.
“Be careful,” he responded, pushing you upright against the side of the building. “Don’t lean over so far.”
The view from the Piltover Academy clocktower was one of your favorites. At sundown the skies turn a brilliant shade of pink as the sun descends into the pale blue.
“I feel like a poser,” you admit, kicking your legs in the breeze of three hundred feet of air. “How many Guardians do you think there were before us? Before Valoran fell?”
Jayce let the sandwich rest in his lap, the sauce seeping into his glitzy uniform. “Too many,” he responded. “...And not enough,” he adds a moment later.
“Do you ever think of them?” You asked. A risky question.
Jayce knows not to ask about the Guardian you really mean, so he asks, “Who?”
“Two years ago. The Zaun team.” It was the safer answer than the one that hit too close to home, and to be honest the Zaun team hadn’t ever left your mind either.
It was one of the worst fights you’d ever heard of, at least that’s what you gathered from the sparse bits Firelight is willing to share.
A rough palm on your shoulder brought a bit of your frontal lobe back, and Jayce gives you a little squeeze. “I do,” he reassured. “It’s tragic. I never saw their Guardian die but it thundered the skies even up here.”
‘Their’ Guardian, he specified. You both know he’s leaving out the obvious.
You offered him a little smile.
At your silence, he continued. “Are you scared? That she’s still out there, I mean?”
To be honest you were terrified, but it was a rhetorical question. Everyone is terrified at the thought of the Fallen Stars, Zoe was just one of many to wipe out a team like that.
“Of course not.”
The familiar blaring of the Piltover public safety alarm system woke you up about three hours after falling asleep at your desk that night. The work didn’t end whether you were an academy student or Guardian of the cosmos. It took an extra couple seconds for you to dash to your bed and retrieve the little pink gemstone from under your pillow. You made a mental note to find a better spot for it since it didn’t save all that much time if you never made it to bed these days anyway.
Glitter. Sparkles. Shiny, shiny, shiny. Transformation.
It was fun the first couple times but it’s really gotten dull now. Maybe the other pinks felt that way too. No real time to think about that now.
Firelight was already at the scene before you. You’d take that as a hit to your captain pride if Firelight wasn’t A, not officially on your team, and B, dominion over literal time.
Still, you couldn’t help but slip out, “Sorry I’m late.”
He gave you a little look but didn’t say anything. “It’s just a void creature.”
The void creature in question loomed distantly in the sky, far enough to look like a clump of stars to the typical eye. Unfortunately, you were no typical eye. Crawling across the spherical cosmos were dozens of deep-violet nebula voidlings with six legs each and long tendrils with stars at the tips. Their eyes–if you could call them that–were just empty pools of darkness, absent sockets that don’t seem to have an end to them.
Lamb joined your side in a golden flash of light, and Forge isn’t long after her.
“Yeesh,” he says. “It’s swarming.”
The moonlight had been drowned out in the five minutes the invasion had been active, blocked out by the voidlings trickling down the sky like ants.
You hear Jayce ready his hammer before you see it in your peripherals.
“Scoreboard?” He asked. It's your favorite game.
You grinned. “I’m for it.”
Firelight nodded and Lamb gave you a little smile, and just like that the team split.
You rushed towards the center of the sphere; the zenith. Heat tingled your fingertips as you pulled starlight from the sky into molten strings, pulling it back before sending it zipping forward like a bullet. It struck two of the voidlines through their blackhole eye sockets and they fizzled out of existence in an astigmatic flash.
“Two!” You shouted out, and Jayce groaned in the distance.
You struck more of them as they flounder out of the sky, pushing them slowly back up into the stars above. Four, then five. Eight. Ten.
The shouts from your teammates reverberate from all directions around you.
You’re leading with sixteen. Mel has twelve. Jayce and Firelight are tied at ten.
Directly above you, however far in the distance is a swirling golden mist filled with glittering stars and a pitch black pupil in the center. The light stung your eyes as it flashes black with each voidling that crawls out of it.
Two more made eighteen. Then another five brought you to twenty-three.
With a path cleared you made a break for the darkness above. A sharp, “Your left!” rung out behind you and a blinding beam of sun disintegrated the creature rearing to take a piece out of you. You thanked Mel and she gave you a quick nod.
After pushing through another ten or so voidlings you finally reached the center. Up close you could almost make out the vein-like streaks that tore at the edges of the pupil, so deep it rippled your skin as it attempted to pull you closer.
You lifted your arm, drawing back another starlight arrow, the bow formulating out of iridescent dust, just barely visible if you looked at the right angle. Just as you’re about to release the energy, something flashes behind the darkness.
Everything goes dark. And then it gets very bright. By the time you’ve blinked back into consciousness it’s already in front of you. A voidmother with at least eighteen golden star eyes peered down at you as you floated aimlessly in the cosmos. Has it struck you already?
You had half a mind remaining to ready another arrow, but as you shift to do so a searing pain shoots down your dominant arm. Grasping it in pain you determine, yes, it had certainly hit you. Where was your team? Surely they would notice.
When you scream for them you hear nothing. Matter of fact, you hear nothing at all. You can feel the vibration of the voidmother in front of you, brooding as she readies another strike. She was made from pure space, of course you couldn’t scream.
Your already throbbing vision blurs at the sudden light. Energy pools at the base of the voidmother as the stars cling to their places in the sky but it’s not enough. Everything in the vicinity warps as she devours it all, the frantic energy orb growing with every second.
It could be worse, you think. To die in combat at the hands of a major void creature. It was no Zoe, but who’s putting that on a tombstone anyway?
It was almost embarrassing how ready you felt to die.
It was worse to realize you’d still be alive to grapple with those implications.
A flash of crimson breaks up the golden light and from out of nowhere something crashes into the voidmother. She ripples from the force and rears back with a silent, but bone-chilling rumble. You fly backwards, flipping like a gyroscope and hurtling back into something hard.
It’s only when Jayce shakes you that your ears pop and your head is flooded with sound once more. In front of you is a figure, bright red and jittering with pure energy, yet only a speck in comparison to the vast darkness in front of them. You thrash against him, demanding to be let go but he doesn’t budge.
Forced to look up at the newcomer, you’re certain now it’s a Guardian. Something about it sends a cold shiver down your spine and Jayce’s own words filter back into your brain.
“Too many Guardians, and not enough.”
You’re certain you’re about to see your second Guardian die to a voidmother.
Today is not that day.