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She sees him. At first, she believes it’s a hallucination. A cruel trick of her captors. But as weeks (or is it months?) pass, she realizes it’s truly him.
He’s dirty. Shivering. His hair and beard have grown wild, and pain etches lines into his face. He doesn’t look like her Jayce, yet the brilliance in his scribbled equations on the walls is unmistakable.
She tries to call out to him, to reach him, to save him. But it hurts.
Wherever he is, it’s too far, the distance ripping through her like a physical wound. The agony of being unable to help him eclipses even her own suffering in this occulorum at times.
She watches helplessly as he devolves—body, mind, and soul. And there’s something else.
A presence, hovering around him, siphoning his light, his mind, his heart. She screams at it to leave him alone. Once, it turns to her—a creature with no form, only contempt—and dismisses her without a word.
(Who else dismissed her like that before? The echo of a cane tapping, an accent heavy with disdain—familiar and fleeting, gone before she can grasp the name.)
Mel’s torturers show her visions of her own failures: Elora loyal to a fault, dying over and over as Mel fails to reach her, hallucinations of her mother being forced to watch her last living child die, her own mind’s construction of how Kino died.
But it’s Jayce who breaks her heart the most.
She watches as his mind deteriorates, as he clutches a worn photograph of her and whispers her name, his voice cracking with desperation.
She draws his face in the sand around her cell, mimicking the lines of his laughter instead of anguish, giving herself something to hold onto—a shared insanity that keeps her sane.
Then she sees the creature siphoning him, sees its intent.
It will break him if it can.
“Leave him alone!” she screams, her voice reverberating in the emptiness. For a moment, the creature’s attention shifts to her. Its gaze is weightless but crushing, like being appraised and discarded all at once.
It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t have to. She feels the dismissal, hears the echoes of old disdain: you are not worthy. But she clenches her fists and yells after it anyway, swearing it won’t take him. Not him.
She fights to hold on, forced to endure more horrors—a vision of her mother, proud and composed even as she’s told her daughter died due to her being distracted, as witches chant and magic blooms like fire around them. Witches.
Her captors revel in her pain. Mel sees what they want her to see, but she knows the truth now. She knows why they’ve taken her, why her suffering feels as though it’s stretching across time and space.
She isn’t just a daughter of power. She’s a conduit.
An empath, a reflection, a mirror to the faces people try to hide. Her captors know this.
How rare she is.
If Kino were here he’d pull her leg, saying even in magic she must overachieve. He’s part of her strength beside Jayce and why they have her kill Kino—no, not Kino.
She flinches, biting back the grief. That name doesn’t belong to that thing anymore.
Her Kino is gone. Dead.
It doesn’t matter what they show her, whatever they get will be forcibly taken.
She’ll give them nothing.
Mel’s acceptance of her magic. Her being a product of an affair. Her true power finally breaks the chains holding her, and when she escapes the occulorum, she tries to follow the tether that binds her to Jayce. To the vision that sustained her.
‘He needs me.’
But when she reaches out, she feels… nothing.
He’s gone.
Panic rises, her instincts screaming for her to search, to push harder, but then she feels it.
A sensation settling beneath her skin, calm and certain, like a hand on her shoulder.
He’s back.
So is she.
The tether between them has been strengthening since that night she chose to invest in his dream, but now it feels like something more. Unbreakable.
She wipes blood and grime from her face and takes off for Piltover, knowing exactly where she’ll find him.
She isn’t surprised. Of course they returned at the same time.
“Nothing is impossible when it comes to us,” she says to herself, a faint smile tugging at her lips.
And for the first time in months, she believes it.