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You are eight years old, and you are called burden.
Weather turns sour, food spoils, sleep brings no rest, harvests are pitiful, and these are faults of your own. It feels as though you are constantly hunched over, eyes lowered and hands folded behind your back, but the disasters at your fingertips never lessen. Staying away brings trouble, but you are not to be seen. You can merely hover, curled behind doors and hugging the shadow of a tree, and hope you are ignored.
Evard is merciless, yanking at your hair and leaving bruises on your arms, and you are berated for your clumsiness. Your mother will not entertain your pointing fingers, simply forcing your head low enough to pass for an apology and sending you to bed early.
It is miserable. It is inevitable. And you take it in stride, in silence, willing yourself to restrain the anger boiling below until you are alone. The tears are humiliating, but things become tolerable once they’ve streaked their path and dried on your sleeves, and the shade of the ghost-willow grants you some privacy. Your breaths even and calm under her drooping boughs, and you can almost imagine her roots curl over your fingers in return.
You wonder if, from within you, she can feel the guilt as it burns you alive, searing into your face as you cry at her feet.
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You are fifteen years old, and you are called monster.
If you close your eyes, you can hear Evard’s voice thrumming within Konigen’s, and it becomes almost effortless to hate him. You can feel the weight of what you now know to be fear, his fear, gripping you around the wrists, chaining you to the temple’s stone floors.
His eyes are wide, horrified as he realizes the binds have snapped free, and as he scrambles backwards across the ground, you feel a sickening satisfaction. The rush of power that floods you in the wake of his weakness is almost overwhelming, pooling cold in the palms of your hands. Your fingers struggle against the weight of it, closing into a trembling fist, and the light around you drains into a depthless orb. Violet scorches the edges of the air around it, and you meet Konigen’s eyes.
Blood soaks stone as the orbs rain down on him, over and over, whirling a violent path around you before crashing through him again. The temple cracks beneath the force of it, the fissures in your hands are widening each time you hurl the orbs at him, and you’re glad he isn’t alive to see the way you cry for him.
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You are twenty-six years old, and you are called Syndra.
In Ionian tongue, you are destruction; you are the bitter taste of rage and the ache of something long-forgotten. The scars marring you are all that remains of your time before the pool, the everlasting stain of blood on your hands, refreshed the moment you awoke. Water was still cascading from you, washed red with the life of the Ionian fool now buried with your jailor. It feels like lifetimes ago.
Some time before, you had stopped counting the bodies below the temple. They don’t matter to you, now, and you can’t imagine they ever will. Noxian, Ionian, they never fail to show true and turn violent in the face of your refusal, and you never fail to best them.
You wonder if the wretched tears that come are the remnants of the dead willow, clawing out of her prison.
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Xan Irelia is the first Ionian to call you by name. She also chooses approach you with her weapons already drawn, an array of engraved blades that hover at her back and flare out when you descend, orbs whirling.
“How bold of you.”
Your voice is hoarse, words jagged from disuse, but you refuse to let it quiet you. She nearly winces at the sound of it, and the blades mirror her, right down to the pinch of her brows. Gently, she raises her hand, and they collapse in on themselves before falling to remain by her side.
“I am not here to fight,” she says, and the rhythm of her voice is almost hypnotic, strong and soothing. Anger burns in the palms of your hands. “Syndra. Would you listen if I spoke?”
To her credit, she does not flinch at the orb that cracks the earth just before her, summoned with a sound like lightning striking. She studies the way the sunset drains into it, light spiralling into it before going dark, and looks back up to you. You can see her lips part, but you speak first, beckoning the orb to you with a curl of your fingers.
“Of Ionia?” you sneer, and her eyes follow the sphere as it settles into your palm. “To beg for my aid, like those before you?”
For a moment, you’re pleased. She is silent, merely taking your words in stride with that near-impeccable, blank expression, and it feels like you’ve won. Pride surges as her mouth closes and her lips turn down at the corners.
And sympathy bleeds from her.
She must see the shift in your demeanor, the rage that thickens your throat like fire, because her blades jerk up to shield her from the orbs you send hurtling through her middle.
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You do not kill Xan Irelia. She spares you.