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The silence in the K/DA dressing room wasn't peace; it was hydrostatic pressure.
Seraphine looked at herself in the mirror, but she didn't recognize the woman staring back. She was wearing her Prestige outfit: an armor of gold threads, pale cyan silk, and crystals meant to reflect sunlight across the ocean. It was a haute couture piece designed for a goddess, for an idol who knew only success. She looked perfect. She looked radiant. She looked like a million-dollar lie, like each gold thread was a shackle, and like the silk weighed as much as soaked lead.
Her magic, that symphony of souls that had once been a rainbow of sounds, had become monochromatic. She no longer heard the dreams of her fans; now, she only heard a dull hum, an abyssal frequency that reminded her of the creaking of a ship sinking in the darkness.
Seraphine stared at her reflection in the triptych mirror, hating the image she saw. She had returned to the KDA studio after her debut at the Ocean Song event, excited to collaborate with her friends again… and failed miserably. Was it the nerves of being in front of four famous women that got to her? No, impossible. She knew Kaisa's demanding nature, Evelynn's perfectionism, and Ahri's sweet but deadly comments. Seraphine had persevered and proven she could hold her own with such a celebrated group… But why did she feel like she no longer fit in?
“You're singing off-key, Seraphine.” Ahri's voice, though soft, still echoed in her ears like a velvet whip.
It had been rehearsal number forty-two. The usual “sparkle” of her magic, that pastel-colored symphony that used to float around her when she sang, was turning murky. They were no longer bubbles of oxygen rising to the surface; it was oil. A thick, black stain seeping into their notes, distorting the harmonies their bandmates needed to shine.
“Your shine is fake, little siren.”
The voice trailed along the wall like rusty metal against stone. Seraphine didn't start; she was too tired for that. Through the mirror, she saw a silhouette that shouldn't be there. Thresh was leaning against the doorframe, lazily turning a black metal card between his long, pale fingers. He wasn't dressed like a typical manager; his dark suit seemed to absorb the light from the makeup spotlights.
Seraphine tensed, gripping the edge of her vanity. When had he even entered K/DA's studio?
"What do you want, Thresh?" she sighed, her voice barely a broken whisper.
"To give you a way out," he replied, moving closer. “Pentakill is looking for a new voice, a voice for the end of the world, and I’m looking for someone to stop pretending they’re broken.”
The metal band's manager placed a black card on Seraphine's pink vanity. A small piece of metal with Mordekaiser's iconic helmet in the center. On the back of the card was the band's studio address.
“It’s a private audition,” the manager continued, walking into the shadows of the hallway. “The industrial area, in the West Adams neighborhood. Think about it, Seraphine. You can keep trying to be the diamond of KDA until you shatter into pieces… or you can come with me and find out what’s underneath all that glitter.”
Thresh vanished before she could reply, leaving behind a trail of cold that made her porcelain skin prickle. Seraphine picked up the iron card. It was icy cold. The Pentakill logo gleamed on it with an aggressive embossing.
Seraphine looked at herself in the mirror again. With a slow, deliberate movement, she plucked one of the crystal flowers from her prestigious headdress. For a moment, she imagined the pale cyan silk gown turning black, the lace transforming into fishing nets, and her voice, at last, ceasing its attempt at sweetness and becoming a roar.
For the first time in months, the dark melody in her chest ceased to be a hum and became a heartbeat. She looked at the card again, and as her fingers grazed the cold metal, she knew the gold ornaments she wore would never shine the same way again.
The drive to the neighborhood was, in Seraphine's mind, a series of catastrophic decisions. When Thresh mentioned the industrial zone, she was already thinking the worst. What if it was a seedy area? It was a place with a bad reputation. Packed with people… «No, Sera. That's very offensive and discriminatory.»
The drive was uneventful, like any other trip around the city. There were no criminals lurking on street corners, nor any change in the air making it heavy. It was a neighborhood like any other. The residential streets were wide, quiet, and tree-lined. Victorian mansions and colonial houses lined some sidewalks, lending a classic early 19th-century suburban atmosphere.
The “industrial zone” wasn't what Sera had imagined. Sure, the warehouses, machine shops, and textile factories were still there, but they had been repurposed; now they housed industrial park restaurants, design agency offices, or small studios.
There were no workers with faces smeared with grease, nor drug dealers in comically oversized trench coats, just a handful of teenagers who laughed at her and took the opportunity to snap photos.
Her high-heeled sandals clicked pretentiously on the uneven pavement. Seraphine walked as if the ground were covered in thorns. She felt like a swan in… in… she couldn't call it a landfill. It was just an ordinary neighborhood, only the area she was in was more open, polygonal. She glanced sideways at the people leaving their shifts, workers and passersby who raised an eyebrow at the sight of a Pop Art figure walking the streets as if she were one of them, without any security or attempt to disguise her appearance.
However, the peach-haired girl was absorbed in the monotonous sound of their souls; like old, gray, and desperately noisy radios.
"What am I doing here?" she asked herself for the tenth time in five minutes. I'm Seraphine. I'm the face of Ocean Song (and soon K/DA). My voice fills stadiums and my face is on every billboard from here to Asia. I shouldn't be walking down a sewer-smelling alley looking for a studio that probably doesn't even have state-of-the-art voice filters.
She stopped in front of a puddle of oily water that reflected her shimmering outfit. For a second, she saw herself as an absurd blur of light in the gloom. She almost turned around, called her private driver, and headed back to the safety of the silk dressing rooms where Ahri would give her a lecture on "maintaining the brand standard."
But then she felt the iron card in her bag.
The metal was hot, throbbing against her side. And that darkness in her chest, that black note K/DA couldn't tame, lurched with anticipation. The fear of failure was great, but the fear of continuing to fake a glittery smile was, for the first time in her life, much greater.
“It’s just an audition,” she lied to herself, straightening her back and trying to ignore a group of young goths who were looking at her with a mixture of mockery and bewilderment. “It’s an ‘experimental’ collaboration. A strategy to see if they can steal K/DA’s little gem.”
She turned the corner into industrial block 93. The building was a former textile factory, its brick facade offering no glimpse of the interior. It looked abandoned from the outside, to be honest, but that very curiosity about what lay inside was what bothered Seraphine most.
She headed for the entrance, which resembled the doorway of an old house more than the entrance to hell. There were no neon signs or red carpets. Just a faded graffiti mural of Mordekaiser's helmet and a mace.
“If this ends with a tetanus infection, Thresh is going to hear from me…” she whispered, though her heart pounded in her ribs with a force that had nothing to do with classism, and everything to do with adrenaline.
She reached for the rusty intercom. She hesitated for another second, looking down at her dress worth thousands of credits, and finally pressed the button.
The journey of the princess from the upper echelons had ended. The mermaid's descent had just begun.
The heavy, reinforced steel door swung open with a hydraulic groan, releasing a blast of cold, static air that made Seraphine's pink hair ripple. She stepped in, head held high, her brow furrowed in a rehearsed expression of disgust, ready to criticize the mold, the grime, and the lack of "vibe" in what she assumed would be a rat's den.
But the word "ugly" died in her throat.
The Threshold studio wasn't a dive. It was a temple. A sanctuary of brutalist luxury.
Her eyes, accustomed to the bright neon of KDA's dressing rooms, took a second to adjust to the elegant dimness. The room was a symphony of dark grays and sophisticated textures. The walls weren't covered in mold; they were coated in a textured finish that looked like powdered obsidian with veins of pale gold, absorbing every sliver of light flickering from the recessed lamps. The ceiling, far from being in ruins, featured a network of black acoustic panels that resembled a chessboard designed by an architect obsessed with perfect sound.
In the center of the room, beneath a crystal chandelier that cast intricate shadows, reigned a gleaming, pristine light wood drum kit, surrounded by a legion of black amplifiers that resembled coffins awaiting a ritual burial. There was no dirt. No rust. There was a visual discipline that exuded power and a financial investment that rivaled even the Hollywood studios themselves.
Seraphine's face was a picture of utter foolishness.
She felt a humiliating heat rise up her neck, staining her cheeks beneath her star-studded makeup. Her entire internal monologue about the "dangerous neighborhood" and "acoustic poverty" suddenly felt childish, stupid, and desperately superficial. She felt like a high-class tourist criticizing an ancient temple.
Her glass boots, worth thousands of credits, which had once given her a sense of security, now felt noisy and intrusive on the ornate carpet covering the wooden floor. Her prestige dress, with its silk ruffles and pearls, didn't look elegant; it looked like a cheap imitation of the dark sophistication that surrounded her. She felt ridiculous. She felt like a porcelain doll who had mistakenly walked into a dragon forge.
Thresh, standing beside a black leather sofa, raised an eyebrow, enjoying the awkward silence.
“Is the atmosphere to your liking, little siren?” he asked, his smile no longer a lure, but a pronouncement. “Or, as you might say, is it lacking a bit of sparkle?”
Seraphine couldn't answer. She lowered her gaze, ashamed of having hesitated, ashamed of her own prejudice, and, most of all, terrified. Because now that she knew Pentakill was no joke, the audition ahead felt like an impossible mountain to climb.
“I…” Her voice, usually so confident, was barely a whisper. “It’s… stunning.”
Seraphine stopped in the middle of the production studio, feeling like a glitch in a horror movie. The silence that followed her entrance wasn’t one of admiration, but of cutting indifference.
Olaf was sitting on an amplifier, wiping one of his drumsticks with a dirty rag. He didn’t even bother to look up; he just gave her a sidelong glance, full of bored disdain. To him, Seraphine was white noise, a brightly colored distraction that had no place in a place where music was measured by the force of its impact. His expression clearly said: “You’ve come to the wrong floor; the casting call for the shampoo commercial is three blocks away.”
Beside him, Yorick leaned his bass guitar against the wall. His face was a mask of perpetual weariness. He didn't look at her with hatred, but with a heavy pity, like someone looking at a tiny glass animal about to be crushed by a hydraulic press. To him, she was just another girl with dreams whom Thresh had dragged to the slaughter for his amusement.
“Is this some kind of sick joke, manager?” Karthus’s voice cut through the air like a scalpel. He approached her, circling her, inspecting the ruffles of her dress with a grimace of disgust. “It smells of expensive perfume and desperation for likes. Thresh, we asked for a voice that could summon storms, not one that sounds like elevator music in the shopping district.”
Seraphine felt the pop star persona she worked so hard to maintain begin to crack. She forced herself to clench her fists, hiding the trembling of her fingers beneath the layers of organza.
“She comes recommended.” Thresh said from the shadows, his voice dripping with venomous irony as he watched Sera's humiliated face. "She says she has a dark melody. I just want to see if she can stop smiling long enough to find it."
That's when the iron behemoth in the background shifted. Mordekaiser leaned forward, peering at the small mermaid through the darkness of his helmet. He said nothing, but his eyes, two red embers deep within the helmet, were fixed on her. There was no hatred, no mockery. There was a predatory curiosity. He wasn't seeing the pop star; he was searching for the crack in the diamond.
Sona, who had been watching the scene unfold from the console, let out a sonic sigh through the speakers. A minor chord, dry and sharp. It was an order: Stop talking. To the cabin.
"You've 'heard' the lady," Olaf growled, finally raising his drumsticks with a smug grin. "Get in there, cupcake. Let's see how long it takes you to burst into tears when we turn up the volume."
Seraphine walked toward the booth, feeling everyone's eyes on her back like icy needles. They were the kings of metal, and to them, she was nothing more than a candy wrapper discarded on a battlefield.
“…Do you want me to improvise?” Seraphine asked, adjusting her headphones. The initial panic of being judged by her appearance was being replaced by a spark of defiance.
“Sing what you feel, not what you sell,” Karthus’s voice replied over the intercom.
Sona pressed play.
The sound that flooded Seraphine’s ears was a liquid bassline, accompanied by a heavily reverbed guitar that sounded exactly like the movement of seaweed in a deep current. It was beautiful, but beneath the surface, Seraphine detected a dissonance. There was a simmering rage in Olaf’s drumming that hadn’t yet erupted.
Seraphine closed her eyes. She forgot the studio, she forgot the expensive, sparkly dress that clung to her chest, and she forgot the cameras.
“Step forward and meet a new sunrise…” she began to sing, a soft, whispered voice flowing with the bass.
Her voice came out clean, but it wasn't her K-pop voice. It was a voice stripped of effects, raw, almost vulnerable. The band stood still. Olaf stopped fiddling with his drumsticks. Sona closed her eyes, nodding slightly; the girl's frequency was finally aligning with the wood and metal.
As the light drums and the rhythm become more pronounced, Seraphine's confidence begins to awaken. She feels she connects with the song; somehow, the lyrics resonate with everything happening around her: the constant pressure not to let K/DA down, to be that smiling face that inspired rainbow dreams, and… this inner conflict. She feels a small pang of sadness. The song is about a fish that doesn't fit in, and she feels exactly like that between her K/DA friends and the metal giants of Pentakill. But it's a sadness that empowers her, because it's real.
But then, the song began to grow. Olaf's drumming began to beat with a firmer, more insistent pulse, like the rapid heartbeat before a performance.
The music flowed with a delicacy that Seraphine hadn't thought possible in that place. During those first few seconds, she let herself be carried away by the tide of clean notes, feeling her voice intertwine with Yorick's bass in an ethereal dance. For a moment, she forgot she was at an audition; she was simply a siren singing in the vastness of an obsidian ocean.
Seraphine, her lungs filled with air that now tasted of ozone and iron, dared to do what she had been avoiding since putting on her headphones: look through the glass.
There, under the dim light of the chandelier, judgment is absolute. The scene is nightmarish: Mordekaiser was a colossal shadow that seems to absorb reality; Karthus bows his head like a crow awaiting its prey while discussing something with Kayle; Olaf and Yorick remain petrified, and Sona's fingers hover over the console, awaiting a mistake or a miracle. Thresh merely smiles, reveling in the suffocation of others.
But there's something new. A variable they hadn't factored into their calculations.
Leaning near the door, a young man who seems to have arrived with the last breath of the industrial wind watches her. He's her age, perhaps a little older, and exudes an aura of melancholy that cuts through the atmosphere thick with Pentakill. He doesn't have the disdainful look of the veterans, but one of pure expectation, as if he were searching in Seraphine for a reflection of his own downfall.
That seventh pair of eyes is the added pressure that makes Seraphine's heart leap violently.
She's no longer just a pop star trying to impress the metal gods to save her career; now she's a broken girl facing someone who could see right through her pearly, glittery facade. Doubt assails her with the force of an abyssal current: What if my voice cracks? What if the guttural growl comes out as a child's shriek? What if I disappoint this stranger who seems to understand pain better than I do?
Seraphine ceases to be a porcelain doll. Her eyes snap open, but they are no longer the bright, commercial orbs of magazine covers; there is an electric emptiness in them, a cold blue that seems to emanate from the abyssal depths. When she opens her mouth, what comes out is not the sweet air of Beverly Hills, but a visceral roar, a guttural frequency that seems to tear at the very tissue of her throat.
“Scale armour blaze…”
It’s a sound that, visually, makes no sense. The contrast is almost grotesque: you see the ruffles of her dress, the iridescent pearls, and her peach-colored hair floating softly, while a vibration emanates from her body that makes the glass of the recording booth begin to rattle with a protesting screech.
Outside, in the studio, the air pressure shifts.
Olaf stops the movement of his hands, leaving one of his drumsticks suspended in mid-air, his eyes wide. Karthus leans toward the glass, a bony hand resting on the frame, as if he needs to touch the vibration to believe it, and Sona, for the first time in the entire session, displays an almost imperceptible smile. She knew. She heard the crack in Seraphine’s soul before anyone else.
The audience of seven—the battle-hardened veterans and the young man with melancholic eyes—remains in deathly silence. Gone is the indifference of "bah, she must have made a mistake." Skepticism has been replaced by violent surprise. They're watching a pink cupcake channel a technical fury that takes many metal vocalists decades to master.
It's a disruptive image. Seraphine clings to the microphone stand, her knuckles white and her body bent from the physical effort of sustaining the chorus. In her mind, the fish in the song is no longer swimming; it's tearing through the net with its teeth.
Through the glass, she sees the face of the young newcomer. He hasn't moved, but his expression of expectation has transformed into something akin to recognition. She has just confessed her darkness in front of everyone, and for a moment, the Diva of the East has died to make way for something far more terrifying and beautiful.
The chorus continues to roar, and Mordekaiser, from his throne of shadows, finally nods once. The siren of the deep has awakened.
After the impact of the first guttural growl, the atmosphere in The Threshold studio changes irreversibly. It's no longer Seraphine following in Pentakill's wake; now it's the band that's being swept away by the tide of the girl in pink.
That newfound confidence acts like a drug. Seraphine stands tall inside the booth, and although her Prestige dress still shimmers under the lights, it no longer resembles the attire of a vulnerable idol, but rather the scaly skin of an abyssal predator. She moves with electric ease, her hands caressing the air as if weaving Sona's notes into a web of silk and steel. She has stopped asking permission to be there. Now, she owns the air everyone breathes.
But then, the song calms again after the second chorus. Seraphine leans toward the condenser microphone, closing her eyes. This is where Pentakill's music meets the ocean. Her voice is clean again, but it has changed; now it has an otherworldly texture, a resonance that doesn't come from her vocal cords, but from the pure magic of her soul.
“Cherished his life to the underworld…”
Her voice begins to multiply in the air. Thanks to its magical echo, it creates harmonies upon harmonies, sounding like a chorus of sirens trapped in a shipwreck. It's not just singing; it's a spell.
In the studio, the temperature seems to drop. The air feels damp, heavy, as if water were beginning to flood the room. The crystals in her costume begin to emit a deep, rhythmic blue pulse, like an emergency light underwater. She isn't just playing a mermaid; she is the abyss calling to those on the surface.
In the final verse, Seraphine gave it her all. The final guttural growled into a sustained scream, a release of pure energy that made the studio lights flicker violently. It was the sound of the perfect girl on the surface shattering into a thousand pieces, and from her remains, something far older and fiercer emerging. When Olaf's final drum hit thundered and the guitars melted into a distorted, slowly fading feedback, the ensuing silence was almost painful.
Seraphine stood motionless in front of the microphone, her head bowed, her chest rising and falling in violent spasms. Her lungs burned, her throat felt like she'd swallowed hot coals, and sweat made the platinum strands of her hair stick to her skin, completely ruining the couture hairstyle that had taken her so long to create.
But, for the first time in months, she felt light.
It was as if she'd let go of an anchor she'd been dragging along the red carpets of Runeterra. That dark stain that infected her pop songs had been expelled in the form of music. She didn't have to pretend anymore. She looked at her hands, still trembling with adrenaline, and a genuine, small, and somewhat wild smile appeared on her lips. She had done it. She had survived the abyss.
Olaf slammed his drumsticks down on the stage, letting out a hoarse, adrenaline-fueled laugh. Karthus remained motionless, his eyes closed, savoring the echo of the last shout as if it were a fine wine. Sona simply leaned back in her seat, a quiet triumph wearing her eyes; her gamble on the pink cupcake had paid off handsomely.
Mordekaiser rose from the shadows. The metallic embellishments of his attire echoed in the studio as he walked toward the glass of the booth. He stopped in front of Seraphine, whose image—disheveled, with smudged makeup and a stained silk dress—no longer offended him. Now, she fit into his world. They had found the missing frequency, the siren who could sing of the beauty of shipwreck.
In the corner, young Viego remained frozen. His eyes hadn't left Seraphine for a second. To him, she was no longer a stranger late to an audition; she was a revelation. Her presence there, disheveled yet powerful, was the only harmony his broken heart could recognize.
Seraphine removed her headphones and finally looked up at them. Gone was the classist girl who wrinkled her nose at the rust. Now, her eyes reflected the darkness of the studio's obsidian walls.
"Do you still think I'm looking for a shampoo commercial?" she asked, her voice husky but brimming with a new and dangerous confidence.
Thresh, from the booth, let out a dry laugh as he began drafting the contract in his mind. Seraphine's fate was sealed. The Diva of Pop had died that afternoon in the lower sector; in her place, the Prestige of the Deep had just reclaimed her throne.