Chapter Text
Zaun.
This word was never a name. It was a diagnosis. A wound in the side of the Piltover empire, festering in the mist that crept along the canyon floor. The air here was thick, an eternal cocktail of forge smoke, the smell of spoiled fish, and the sweetish stench of open sewer channels. The sun didn't descend here. It was replaced by the phosphorescent glow of mushrooms growing on the walls, and the rare, magically-created bridge-beacons Pilto had thrown across the chasm.
Here, the crown did not rule, but the ebb tide did. When the poisonous yellow waters of the Pledge River receded, revealing the silt-laden bottom littered with the wreckage of past eras and the bones of the unlucky, Zaun came alive. Thievish figures with torches slithered down to gather anything that might have a shred of value: rusty gears, shards of artifacts, river monster teeth. The ebb tide gave food, gave resources, gave a chance. A brief, dirty, desperate chance.
In an old network of caves gaping in the rock just above the low-tide level lay a prison known as "The Womb." A place where they threw those not worth executing immediately, but whose existence was meant to be forgotten. The cells here had no bars—they were carved directly into the stone, and the entrances were blocked with piles of rubble and heavy wooden barricades that the guards would dismantle once a day to push through a bowl of slop called stew.
In one such stone womb, Vi spent ten years of her life.
She didn't count the days. At first, she tried—scratching marks on the wall with a stick where moisture seeped. But the stick was taken after her first attempt at resistance. And the walls blurred into one long, endless nightmare. Time here was measured not by the sun, but by sounds: the distant hum of Piltover's carillons from above, the shouts of the overseers, the moans of neighbors who were taken away and didn't return. It was measured by the growth of fungal outgrowths on the ceiling and by how her own body, once strong, became a skinny frame stretched with skin, scars, and grime.
They threw her in here as a girl, almost a child, with a heart scorched by grief and fists bloodied against the guards' armor. She was accused of arson, assaulting the guard, of murder. Of killing enforcers. Of killing her. It was the truth. And a lie. But in Zaun, truth was slippery, like an eel in the silt, and it had been devoured by the shadows of the past.
At first, Vi raged. Every day. She lunged at the barricade when they brought food, snarled like a beast, demanded justice, screamed a name that drove her mad. Powder. They beat her. With clubs, whips. Deprived her of food and water for long periods. Once, after a particularly fierce outburst, they branded her left shoulder—a skewed Piltover hammer, the mark of a "dangerous element." The pain was cleansing. For a while.
Then came the apathy. Deep, all-consuming, like the silt of the Pledge. She lay on the stone floor, peering into the darkness, and heard a child's laughter in the distant roar of the waterfall. Saw wide-open, trusting blue eyes in the patterns of mold. Felt the warmth of a small hand placed in hers on her palm. "I'm with you, Vi. Always." A lie. The bitterest lie. She had abandoned her. Left her alone in the fire and the screams. And what of her now? Dead. Had to be dead. In that hell that Vi had created with her arrogance, her blind faith in her own strength.
The thought that Powder could have survived was worse than torture. Because if she survived… what had she become in that hell? What could a fragile, broken girl become in the jaws of Zaun?
The years in "The Womb" turned Vi from a rebel into a ghost. Her red hair, once cut short, had grown into dirty, tangled locks hiding her face. Her eyes, once bright blue, had dulled, becoming like two pieces of ice filmed with the yellow haze of sleeplessness and hunger. Her muscles, though emaciated, still held the memory of strength, but now it was the strength of a trapped animal, needed only to snatch a crust of bread from a cellmate. She had almost forgotten how to speak. The sound of her own raspy voice frightened her.
Freedom came unexpectedly and senselessly. One morning, the barricade was dismantled not to push through a bowl, but completely. In the opening stood an unfamiliar overseer, young, with an indifferent face.
"That one, with the brand," he tossed over his shoulder. "Release her. Decree of the new Queen. All the small fry—clean-up."
"New Queen?" someone rasped from a neighboring cell.
The overseer snorted.
"Yeah. Our Jinx has been crowned. Now she's not just the head of the clans, but the Queen of Zaun. And she doesn't like that her palace stinks of an old prison. Get lost, before they change their minds."
She was shoved roughly into a damp corridor, blinded even by the dim light of the fungal lamps. Her legs, unaccustomed to walking, buckled. They led her through a maze of tunnels, upward, toward the sounds of the city. No one explained, gave water, or offered help. The procedure was routine: they stripped off her rotting prison rags, threw her a faded, patched shirt and pants in return, and pushed her out through a hidden door right into the stinking guts of the Lower City.
And that was it. Ten years. And just… "get lost."
Vi stood leaning against a wet wall, gasping. The air, stinking and poisoned, seemed like nectar to her. She saw the sky—not the real one, of course, but the eternal toxic veil over the canyon, stained crimson and ashen by the waste of Piltover alchemy. Heard the hubbub, clanging, shouts, music from taverns. Life. Dirty, cruel, teeming life. She took a step, then another. She was surrounded by people, but she was invisible. Another wretch, another shadow. And that was a blessing.
She wandered aimlessly, moving on the instincts of a survivor: seeking shelter, water, food. The past clung to her with bony fingers. Here was an alley where she and Vander used to chase gang members from another clan. Here were the ruins of an old workshop where she first forged her own gauntlets. Every stone, every turn evoked a ghost. The most painful ghost—a small one, with two blue pigtails.
On the third day, while rummaging in a trash heap behind some tavern hoping to find something edible, she overheard a conversation.
"…and she said Zaun doesn't ask anymore. Zaun demands. And the Piltover rats whimper, but they pay tribute."
"Jinx—sorry, the Queen… she's gone mad, right? They say at her coronation she set off such a fireworks display with her contraptions that half of Firelight Alley turned to glass."
"Shh! Don't chatter too much. She hears everything. In every chimney, in every splash of the Pledge. And she has a long memory. Those who were against her election… have you seen what's left of their houses? Just colored glass and the smell of sulfur."
"But there's order. Before, the clans cut each other up every day. Now everyone fears one. That's better."
"Or worse. She calls it 'the chaos of higher harmony.' Heard yesterday all over the city new symbols appeared? Not clan brands, but… some crazy faces, drawn in purple paint. Her personal mark."
Vi froze, clutching a stale crust of bread in her hand. Jinx. The Queen of Zaun. Now she ruled everything. And ruled, it seemed, by fear and madness. Something twinged inside Vi. Something old and almost forgotten—contempt for the strong who trample the weak. But she was too weak, too broken, for that feeling to turn into anything. She was an empty shell.
She found refuge in an abandoned smokestack of an old factory. The place was hard to reach, stinking, but hidden from view. There, she began to piece herself back together bit by bit. She stole food at markets, drank rainwater that collected in dents on the roof. At night, she was tormented by nightmares. Always the same: fire, a collapsing roof, her own hand pushing away a small, clinging hand… and eyes. First full of fear and betrayal. And then, in recent years, those eyes in the nightmares changed. They became bright violet, insane, glowing with poisonous joy. And the laughter, which no longer sounded like a childish echo, but a piercing, hysterical chorus merging with the howl of the Piltover wind in the pipes.
One day, venturing out on her "hunt" for provisions, Vi came across a square that used to be a marketplace. Now it was transformed. Old stalls were demolished, and in their place stood a strange, asymmetrical structure of scrap metal, glass, and glowing tubes. Banners hung on it with an incomprehensible symbol—a grinning, crooked face. A crowd had gathered in the square. On an improvised balcony of this structure stood a figure.
Vi froze in the shadow of an arch, her heart suddenly pounding somewhere in her throat.
The Queen was far away, but everyone could see her. Tall, slender, she seemed the living embodiment of chaos. She wore no brocade robes or chainmail. Her outfit was sewn from leather straps, scraps of bright blue and purple fabric, adorned with gears, cartridges, and small, shimmering devices. Her hair, the color of blue ash, was gathered into two long, messy braids falling below her waist. Her face was hidden by a mask styled after the same grinning face on the banners, but even from a distance, the tension in her posture was visible, the nervous energy radiating from her in waves.
She didn't speak. She whispered. But this whisper, amplified by some devices, thundered across the square, penetrated bones, scraped nerves. The voice was melodic, mocking, hysterical, and infinitely lonely.
"…they think they can build their bridges OVER us…" the whisper-thunder swept over the crowd. "They think their light casts no shadow… But I see you… I hear you… Your fear is my breath. Your rage is my paint… We will no longer crawl in their shadow… We will become the fire that burns their skies!"
The crowd roared. Shouted something about "Jinx," about the "Queen of Chaos." Vi saw people in the crowd with pale, ecstatic faces reaching out to her as if to a savior or a deity.
And then the Queen did something. She raised a hand, and a small, purple firefly ignited in it. It soared up, circled, then shot toward an old, abandoned Piltover signal tower on the other side of the chasm. There came not a sound, but a sensation—a ruptured eardrum, silence filled with pressure. Where the tower stood, a perfectly round purple sun appeared for an instant. Then it collapsed, leaving behind only a cloud of ashen dust and a rain of sparkling glass.
Silence. And then—a deafening, frenzied roar from the crowd.
Vi recoiled deeper into the arch, leaned against the cold stone. She felt nauseous. Not from the spectacle, but from something else. From that voice. From that hysterical, broken melody, in which there was something… elusively familiar. Something that snagged on the deepest, most abandoned refuge of her memory. But no. It was impossible. It was just the delirium of her exhausted mind, overlaid on nightmares.
She turned and ran. Ran away from the square, from the roar of the crowd, from that terrifying whisper. Ran deep into the slums, into the familiar, rotten bowels of Zaun, where no one could find her. And certainly not some insane queen.
She didn't know that this insane queen, standing on the balcony and watching the wave of adoration and fear spread through the crowd, absently rubbed her thumb against her forefinger, as if feeling an invisible thread. Her violet gaze, sliding over the streets below, lingered for a second on a lone, ragged figure fleeing in the distance. Something trembled in the corner of her eye, hidden by the mask. Something like a flash of unbearable, ancient pain. But that instant was immediately flooded by a tide of paranoid delight and hatred for the whole world. She smirked under the mask, and a whisper, no longer amplified, escaped her lips:
"Everyone… see everyone… Hear everyone… No one hides. Especially you, sister…"
But these were words for herself. No one heard them but the wind howling in the canyon. And Vi, gasping, was already burrowing into her smokestack, shaking and trying to push out of her head the voice that seemed to have clawed its way into her soul.
Two halves of one broken heart. One—on a throne built of fear and gunpowder. The other—in the dirt, surviving out of habit. They were separated by only a few hundred vertical steps and a whole chasm of pain, years, and lies. But Zaun was small. And the ebb tide would someday have to expose all its secrets.