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“Love is born into every human being: it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole… and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.”
- Plato, The Symposium
Exploring the ruins under the city was probably a silly idea. But Lenna was no stranger to silly ideas.
Ever since Lenna was young, she had always been... different. At first, the grown-ups found it endearing. They would all crowd around and tell her how 'precious' she was, how 'cute' that she believed in fanciful things like magic. It wasn't until Lenna started getting older that she learned that in the City, believing was a thing you could only do when you were small. The adults of the world thought only of what they could know, beyond any doubt: the width of a doorway, the composition of concrete, equations of heat transfer and kinetic energy--things that could be counted, molded, controlled.
And when Lenna wasn't small anymore, the adults wanted to control her too, to fit her into their perfect little equations where they knew what would come out on the other side.
But there had to be some things yet to be discovered. The Calamity proved that. Not everything in the world could be predicted, understood, known.
"How much longer?" Marko whined.
"We'll be there soon," Lenna said, digging a chocolate chip granola bar out of her bag and handing it to him. "Eat this, it'll help."
Bringing her little brother hadn't been a decision, exactly. But she was used to bringing him along on her adventures by now, and there was no one else to watch him. Besides, he could take care of himself. Mostly.
Lenna trailed her hand along the dark stone walls, the rough surface feeling like comfort under her fingertips. Down here, everything felt more real. It was nothing like the perfectly fabricated facets of the City, walkways polished so smooth you could slip on them even when they were dry. The caves down here were raw and wild, hewn from whatever forces first made up the ground, long before humans cut and filed and measured it to suit their purposes. They were untamed, not beholden to any end. They simply were. Purposeless and aimless and free.
The dark caverns underground felt more like home than the City ever did.
Eventually they came upon a metal door: a big, brass, round plate, apparently designed to hermetically seal the room behind it. The door had been sliced through in a big jagged arrow--melted, by the looks of it, maybe with a focused beam of energy--and most of the door itself lay flat on the floor before them, pointing inwards like it was beckoning them inside. Lenna shivered with anticipation. She had never come down this far before.
She placed a hand on her brother's back, guiding him through the opening, and they emerged into a large chamber, its walls marked with a shining diamond pattern. It had once been a perfect dome, but now parts of it had collapsed in places, leaving a maze of fractured stone that Lenna and her brother carefully navigated around. The ground was criss-crossed in strange patterns, multicolored and organic. They reminded her of something. She couldn't place what, but the sight of them made the back of her neck crawl.
Lenna knew this place. It had never been described or depicted in any textbook, but she could feel it, that this was the place where the Hexgates once stood. She gazed up, into where the ceiling disappeared into a tunnel, where beams would focus the arcane energy into a precise point. Once the energy had concentrated enough, the whole thing would fire around the target airship, launching it across the continent like a railway made of light.
What she wouldn't give to see that, just once.
Below this tunnel was a brass structure, still mostly intact, but bent in some places where the ceiling had come down on it. In awe, Lenna approached it, then traced her fingertips along the strange markings on the side. They were runes, she realized. She couldn't glean any meaning from them, as the study of runes had been outlawed for a long, long time. Yet she continued to trace her fingers along them, like something compelled her, as if being inside of a piece of history made it impossible to do anything else.
"What do you think they mean?" she asked Marko in wonder.
Of course, he didn't know. He just watched with round blue eyes as she continued to trace them. Lenna's heart was suddenly filled with longing, a deep sort of ache for a world she would never know.
"I wish someone could teach us," she said, choking down an embarrassing waver in the back of her throat. She couldn't cry in front of Marko, especially not about something stupid like this. She had to be his big sister. She had to be strong for him.
Just then, a flicker of something seemed to come alive under Lenna's fingertips, and she gasped, pulling her hand away like she had been shocked. A faint glow began to run along the runes in the order that she had been tracing them.
She stepped back, putting a protective arm around Marko just as a deep hum started up around them. Lenna's heart leapt into her throat. Had she turned the device on somehow? Had she revived the Hexgates after all this time?
A brilliant glow began to emanate from a spot on the ground, and Lenna turned to find that it was coming from the strange markings, the ones that looked like rainbow rot. She recognized why they looked wrong, now--they were like the cancers she was learning about in class. Except instead of bubbling up into tumors of flesh, now they seemed to split open, letting light through as if the stone beneath them barely constrained a supernova.
The resonant hum kicked up and up, vibrating Lenna's eardrums, the brass structure, the entire chamber around them, until there was a crack in empty space, a jagged line of light. It resembled fractures in shifting stone, like the ones they had seen in the caverns on the way here. But the crack was floating, as if the air itself was the thing that had broken. Before she could make sense of this impossibility, the barest edges of what looked like fingertips began to pick away at it.
Lenna didn't know how to comprehend it--a nothing that was like its own separate, substantial thing. The fingers were prying against reality itself, and the empty space of the chamber was dissolving into an impossibly bright void.
Bit by bit, the fingers became more visible as they struggled against the barrier between worlds. Some of the fingers seemed to be different from each other. Some were thin, bony, pale. Others were thicker, more rounded, the skin darker in tone. Eventually the hands had created enough space to fit all the way through, and one of each--the smaller and paler, and the larger and tanner--jutted out into space and pressed against the empty air as if it was a solid wall. Together the hands braced themselves, and more of their arms became visible.
They were hands and arms like people's hands and arms. Human. Which was a relief to Lenna, as in her terror she had thought that she'd be faced with something equally as incomprehensible as an arcane crack in reality.
This relief was short-lived.
The crack had crumbled enough for Lenna to observe in horror that one of the arms--the paler one--had too many joints; two separate elbows rather than just the one. Her eyes skipped over it like a scratch in an optical disc, her mind refusing to resolve its faulty prediction.
The arm was attached to a gnarled shoulder, set too high for a human--which was just as well, as the arm would hang too low otherwise. The shoulder dislocated with an unnatural jerking motion as it shoved itself through the portal, the hand gripping the edge of the split in space to yank more of the grotesque body out.
Then the edge of a torso came through, but Lenna didn't want to look anymore, because what seemed to be lumps of bone were angled out, crossing over each other in a jumble, like someone had taken all of the ribs in a human body and shoved them into a large sack made of flesh.
There was a smack against the stone like bare skin, and Lenna peeked between her fingers to find that a tanned foot was now planted in front of the portal, with what appeared to be--thankfully--the correct number of joints. With a labored grunt, the creature pulled itself the rest of the way through, and Lenna was faced with the full picture of the monstrosity that had come into their world.
The two feet shuffling carefully on the stone as it caught its balance were on the large side of average for a human, attached to long, lithe calves and thick, muscular thighs that disappeared into a mass of horrible flesh. Lenna thought she could see where hips had tried to form but hadn't quite managed it in the confusion of whatever process had created this thing. Atop this mass was more of the too-many-ribs, angled and chaotic on both sides of the too-tall form.
The skin was mottled, like a calico cat, pale splotches interspersed with tan. The thing had two belly-buttons, and between them was a pair of forearms, one large and one small. The fingers were interlocked, gripping each other sweetly, like lovers do.
The creature moved like a clumsy, misshapen puppet, limbs flapping wrongly as they jerked upwards and came crashing back down onto the stone. The bones clacked hollowly against each other in their quest for forward motion, and the joints cracked with every articulation, like the sick, satisfying popping of fluid in her grandfather's knuckles.
Lenna pushed her brother behind her in pure, terrified instinct. She shouldn't have come here, shouldn't have brought Marko here. She had just been so captured by the dream of magic being for everyone, rather than banished to all but the innermost libraries of the City. She had hoped, desperately, that there might be some answer in these walls, some wisp of hope that the dream of magic was within her reach, ready to be uncovered. That the memory of its creator, somehow, could help her. Could help them all.
"Hi there," came a voice from the thing before her, spoken like it was uncertain, cautious, but friendly. It was distantly familiar, like someone she had heard in passing when she was young, and it had the ring of earned confidence behind it--the voice of someone who had spent a lifetime in front of crowds.
As the thing approached Lenna and her brother, she saw now where the voice had come from.
Perched atop the shoulders of the mangled creature was a head, and that head looked remarkably like the images of the Man of Progress himself from Lenna's textbooks. The very image she had spent days studying obsessively, as if the lines of his face could give her the secret to his dream.
She gawked at it--him? Him.
"Jayce Talis?" said Marko from behind her.
Jayce Talis gave them a dazzling smile. "In the flesh."
Lenna reviewed that flesh once again and gagged into her fist.
"That's very funny, Jayce," came another voice. It was dry and chiding, but also fond. There was something in the way the voice was shaped, an accent Lenna had never heard before, a trap closing slowly around the words before they could fully escape.
Lenna adjusted her vantage point to locate the source of the new voice, and found the sharply-featured head of a man with golden eyes, sat at the other end of the mess of collarbones and shoulderblades. His jawline was crisp. His cheekbones were angled like blades. His brows were heavy but expressive. And his thin, deeply-bowed lips were quirked in an expression of levity, playful and charming.
"You're scaring the poor girl," the voice continued, swirling its way out of the mystery man's mouth, twisting the lips into a pout in its wake.
"Who are you?" Lenna blurted.
The head looked at her then, and she had to stop herself from jumping back. The eyes were intense, like they were dismantling her with their gaze alone, trying to figure out what made her tick. But there was no malice. If anything, the look was filled with warmth--it was just a lot.
"My name is Viktor," the head said patiently. A lot like Lenna's schoolteachers from when she was no older than her brother, back when most adults were kind and sweet rather than expectant and demanding. When adults cared more about whether she was having a good time and less about what she would make of herself in a few short years.
"I've never heard of you," Lenna said, surprising herself with her boldness. It was ruder than she meant, but it was at least true.
Jayce Talis did not look pleased about it.
"Seriously?" said Jayce Talis. "You know who I am but you don't know Viktor?" He turned to Viktor's head. "Can you believe this?"
Viktor's lips returned to a pout. "Unfortunately, I can. I always assumed Piltover would try to write me out of its history books. I just wish that I hadn't given them a good reason."
"What are you talking about?" said Lenna, and she swallowed a gasp as both heads turned to look at her.
"What did they tell you?" asked Jayce Talis.
And so Lenna recounted the stories they were told in classes, of the Calamity and how the inventor of Hextech had deduced its coming, just in time to sacrifice himself to save the city.
Viktor looked as if he was about to be sick. Jayce Talis, on the other hand, looked angry.
"That's not what happened," he said.
"It is," said Viktor.
"Not like that," Jayce Talis insisted. The arm on his side--his arm, Lenna realized--swung and trembled with its too-many joints, his hand opening and closing into a fist. "They're vilifying you," he growled. "They don't understand."
"They understand enough," Viktor said quietly.
Lenna wasn't sure what to make of all this. "They outlawed magic, you know." She cleared her throat. "Again, I mean."
Jayce Talis scoffed. "Of course they did."
"But you wanted to bring magic to the people, didn't you?" said Lenna.
"We both did," said Jayce Talis. "That was the entire point of Hextech. Everything else, the Hexgates-- Wait, are they still using the Hexgates?"
Lenna looked up at the ceiling of the cavern they were in. "No. They fell into ruin a century ago."
"A century?" Viktor said. "How long has it been since we've gone?"
"Time must work differently in the Arcane," Jayce Talis said.
"Is that where you were?" asked Marko eagerly from behind her.
Viktor gave him a warm smile. "That's right. A world made of pure magic."
"Could I see?" Marko said, prompting Lenna to grip his shoulder in warning. "Ow!"
The pair frowned and looked at each other, then back at her brother.
"Seeing the Arcane with mortal eyes would likely cause one to throw up," Viktor said.
"Which you did," Jayce said to Viktor.
"I did," Viktor confirmed.
Lenna was halfway there already. The sight of the creature, fused and deformed, was nigh unbearable. She shielded her eyes, concerned that looking at it for too long might permanently damage her psyche.
"Could you come through again in a different body?" she asked. It felt like a silly question, but the situation was so far beyond the normal that Lenna didn't think there was any harm in asking.
"Can we do that?" said Jayce, turning to Viktor's head.
"I don't see why not," said Viktor.
And so they disappeared back through the portal.
After a moment or two, they returned, and they were an equally fused, combined, disfigured creature--though this time the configuration was slightly different. Two of the legs had switched places, so that there was one longer and one shorter leg to each pair, making the entire body awkwardly lopsided. There were five arms, now, the first four in their original places but another springing from the thing's back, sporting three long, equidistant fingers. The ribs jutted out further that they had before, causing lumps and bumps and ridges in places that did not conform to any familiar shape.
Before, they were a bag of bones. Now, there seemed to be a lot more bones and a lot less bag.
"How's that?" said Jayce.
"I..." Lenna sat on the ground. "I don't think that's any better."
The two heads looked at each other, shrugged their horrible shoulders, then turned back to Lenna on the ground.
"Oh well," Viktor said.
Lenna swallowed the bile that was climbing up her throat.
"Does it hurt?" she asked faintly.
"Hm?" said Viktor.
"What?" said Jayce.
"Being... like that," Lenna said with a wince, gesturing at their fused mass of flesh and bone. "You were separate people when you were alive. At least I assume."
"Not really," Jayce said, grinning. "We've always shared a brain anyway. This isn't that different."
Viktor smiled at him fondly, then addressed Lenna, "It isn't like this all the time. In fact, it has never been like this before--we have not tried to become corporeal prior to this moment."
"It makes sense," Jayce said. "Our souls merged in the Arcane, so why shouldn't our bodies do the same?"
"It just doesn't seem useful," Lenna said in distress.
"For that, there would have to be a use, no?" said Viktor. "We can communicate with you, which is what you wanted. Is that not useful enough?"
Lenna looked up at them and narrowed her eyes. "How would you know what I wanted?"
"Ah, well," Viktor said, his lips quirking, "if you don't want to speak with us, we will stop wasting your time."
"No, wait!" Lenna said. They couldn't leave, not after she just found them.
They hadn't moved at all. Instead, Viktor smiled. "That's what I thought."
Jayce made a chiding noise. "Viktor, don't play games. She's having a hard enough time as it is." He turned to Lenna, nothing but kindness in his eyes. "What do you want to know?"
"Could you teach us magic?" came Marko's excited voice from behind her.
"Marko!" scolded Lenna. What was she going to do with him? She really should have left him with a friend.
The creature leaned forward, bending the knees of its human forelegs like a horse, listing off to one side from the uneven leg lengths. Jayce reached out his double-elbowed arm in a gesture of offering. "Of course we could."
Lenna shook her head. She was far from ready to put all of her faith in this thing that had sprung from a crack between worlds.
"Magic has been dead for a long time," she said to the creature. "Can you even bring it back?"
"No matter how many times Runeterra tries to snuff it out," said Jayce, full of conviction, "the ways of magic will always be recreated when its people need it most."
"So long as there is belief, magic can never die," Viktor added. "Many gods were once mages--us included."
Lenna grimaced. They weren't gods. Jayce Talis, if anything, had been presented to them as a cautionary tale. In fact, Lenna was pretty sure she was the only one who believed Hextech was anything other than a tragic (and expensive) mistake.
But now that she had the consequences of that magic in front of her, she wasn't sure her teachers had been wrong after all.
Viktor seemed to clock her skeptical look--or maybe they could read minds?--because he said, "You called out to us, and we answered."
That was true. Like a prayer.
"But that doesn't mean anything," Lenna said. "What if you're a trickster god?"
Jayce shook his head, impatient. "It doesn't work like that."
Viktor tilted his head, an amused look on his face. "That's exactly what a trickster god would say."
"You're not helping!" said Jayce.
"But you could help," Marko said. His voice was quiet, but hopeful. Lenna could hear the plea in it, and she was sure she wasn't the only one.
The heads of the creature looked to her now, one small olive branch in this cool, ancient chamber. They were deferring to her, letting her choose what she was ready to know and what was better left to the dead. Was she prepared to uncover the secrets she had been searching for?
Could she live with herself if she didn't?
Lenna took a breath. "Alright. What... actually happened to Piltover?"
And both heads smiled, like this was what they were waiting for all along.
The story they told was one of love and tragedy. Two young inventors, brought together by a shared dream to make the world a better place. Lenna recognized herself in the tale--sometimes timid, sometimes fierce, but filled with an unwavering conviction that there was something to be done to make things better, if she could just believe in it hard enough.
Jayce and Viktor had been from two different worlds, with different ideas of how their shared technology should help their people. Would it serve better supporting commerce? Weaponry? Was it better democratized, distributed to the hands of the common folk? Who should wield the power of Hextech? Who could keep it safe?
And were there, perhaps, things that technology should never do?
Even though these disagreements had led them down terrible paths, nearly destroying Piltover in the process, the two scientists had come back together in the end.
Jayce was looking at Viktor with shining eyes. "At that moment, I knew that Viktor was what I had been searching for my whole life," he said, with a note of finality.
Lenna stared at them, mouth agape. "You went back in time to make sure you discovered magic? Even knowing what it would lead to?"
Viktor shrugged his lumpy shoulder. "A different version of me. I can't be sure of his logic, but I think I have a pretty good guess." He turned to Jayce then, matching his look of quiet adoration.
"So you would be together?" said Lenna. "But that's insane."
The hands in the center of their body grasped each other tighter.
"It worked, didn't it?" said Jayce. "And now we'll never be apart."
Lenna groaned and buried her face in her hands. "So what does that mean for us? Is the City--Piltover doomed to repeat its mistakes forever?"
"There is a reason mages are typically born," said Viktor.
"In my hubris," explained Jayce, "I thought the Arcane was comparable to kinetic force, that it could be shaped and directed in predictable paths."
Viktor inclined his head. "But it takes a human mind, an intelligence to negotiate with it and wield its power. One cannot simply sign a contract and expect the Arcane to honor it in perpetuity."
"Yeah," Jayce said with a chuckle, "it doesn't seem to like that too much."
"But you weren't always mages," Lenna said. "If neither of you were born into magic, how come you can use it now?"
The two heads looked at each other.
"We and the Arcane have... come to an agreement," Viktor said carefully.
"Now we play by its rules," said Jayce. "And we can teach you to do the same, if that's what you want."
"Yeah!" exclaimed Marko.
"No!" said Lenna.
Her brother turned to her, confusion in his beautiful blue eyes. "No?"
"I can't let you break the Ethos," Lenna said. "It's too dangerous."
"But I thought that was the point!"
"It is, but..." Lenna huffed. "You're too young!" She turned to the two scientists. "Teach me instead."
They both had on doubtful looks.
"Eh, well, you see--"
"You'd have to come with us," Jayce said. "Into the Arcane."
Lenna's stomach dropped. She looked at her baby brother. Who would take care of him if she left? Who would stop him from getting into trouble?
"How long?" she asked, though she suspected she knew the answer.
"Years, maybe," said Jayce. He sighed. "The truth is, we don't know."
Was this something she was willing to do? She knew the City needed healing, that was the entire point of searching for something else, something unpredictable, a new variable to add to a closed system. But what was it worth giving up?
Just then, there was a terrible crumbling sound from somewhere above them. Lenna looked up to find a piece of the domed ceiling loosening directly overhead. As it came apart and began to hurtle toward them, the world seemed to move in slow-motion. She pushed her brother out of the way and jumped back as the fragment of stone landed between them. Before she could get up from where she had landed, the floor shifted beneath her, tilting as it separated from the section beside it--the beginnings of a landslide.
The section of ceiling disappeared into a yawning crack in the ground, now several feet wide between Lenna and her brother.
"Marko!" Lenna shouted.
"Lennie!" Marko shouted back. He sounded surprised, but not frightened.
She looked across the gap to find that Marko was safe, shielded by the twisted arms of the creature. Small blessings.
"I'm going with them, Len," called Marko. "I'm gonna be a mage!"
What?
"You can't do that!" Lenna said. "What am I gonna tell mom and dad?"
This was punctuated by another deep rumble in the chamber, and the section of floor that Lenna was on slid just a few more inches away.
"Tell them I have to save the City." The look in Marko's eyes was so sincere, but far too old for his young face.
"You have to go," said Jayce. "The chamber is collapsing--it's not safe for you here."
"You can't take him!" Lenna cried. "I won't let you!"
"Careful, young one," said Viktor. "I have seen what happens when choice is denied. You do not want those consequences on your hands."
"We'll keep him safe," said Jayce. "I swear it by every god of Runeterra. By our very lives, we will bring him back to you one day."
But that wasn't Lenna's real concern, not after what she had seen.
"Will he be the same?" she asked, her voice cracking.
The silence that followed was so thick that even the shifting rocks held their breath.
"No," said Viktor. Then he gave her a grim smile. "But he will still be your brother."
Jayce reached down to Marko with his long, double-elbowed arm, and Marko took his hand. Together they looked like a storybook tale, the magical creature and the innocent boy. But it was wrong, twisted. The Arcane was nothing like Lenna imagined it to be.
Marko looked up at Jayce fondly, then turned to Lenna to wave goodbye.
"Marko!" she screamed. "Marko, don't go!"
But there was nothing she could do as her brother disappeared into the impossible rift made of light. She fell to the ground, her knees striking the hard surface with a sound that echoed throughout the now-empty chamber.
"It was supposed to be me," she wailed. "I was the one who went searching for magic. It was me!"
In answer, the ground beneath her rumbled again, and she felt as it began to tilt into the abyss. Heart pounding, she got to her feet and ran out of the chamber. She didn't stop running until she was back on solid ground, filled with adrenaline, caked in sweat, and panting in labored, trembling breaths.
Lenna didn't know how long it would be until she saw her brother again. But she knew, somehow, that Jayce Talis was a man of his word. He and Viktor would do everything in their power to bring Marko back to her.
That would have to be enough.