In the beginning, there was nothing.

From nothing, there came two. Born from conflict, they coursed with energy: a force of wills.

Order.

Chaos.

Their opposition moved reality into being.

From these two, came everything.

Demons say that upon the dusk Chaos slew Order, all the universe’s suns and moons went out. Like candles — blown into smoke.

He would not know; Aphelios entered the ranks of creation, long, long after that fated night.

“What are we?”

The entire room shrieked back: “The bones and body of Chaos!”

“What is it we do?”

“We bring night upon the universe!”

“What is it we desire?”

“Eternal darkness!”

Off to one side, Vladimir yawned loudly. “Do get on with it already,” he called.

Aphelios knelt upon the slab that served as their pitiful excuse for an altar. He stared ahead stonily while his fellow demons splashed their hands in the blood of mortals. With it, they painted themselves wild. Scrawled, meaningless runes. Messy symbols of power. Many simply smeared their fingers down their faces, leaving thick streaks between eyes and mouths. Bloodshot irises cast dim red light upon spiny necks and arms. By contrast, the bowl was like a cup of living flame when brought to him.

DRINK, the crowd seemed to reverberate. The mass of writhing, demonic bodies seemed to pant and pulse around him, the wet thud of a collective heartbeat. DRINK WITH US, APHELIOS.

So, he drank.

And felt his heart promptly burst.

Blood bubbled. Bone charred. Organs ruptured, liquefied, and reformed inside him meanwhile his tongue swelled and gagged him alive. In their burning Aphelios’s eyes blinded him, his brain boiled within his skull, until the sheer extent of the agony emptied him out. Rendered him a shell. A husk: incapable of thought, beyond those centuries-honed instincts.

That alone kept his senses unclouded — so that a vague part of him looked, and saw, and understood, as the last shade of sunlight sank below the horizon.

All around, shadows shrilled and laughed. Black teeth snapped at the cooling air.

Sate us, they wailed, and their hunger slavered on the dusk’s heels. Bring darkness on them all!

Aphelios stared. Heard. Bled out, invisibly.

Blinded, feverish with poison — yet his body moved anyways: like steps to a ritual he could never forget.

At night, Aphelios didn’t often dream.

When he did, it was usually about one thing only.

Thus, in this one too, the moon filled up the blue-black sky. It punctured through the heavens, drained the darkness. Huge, radiant white; Aphelios breathed, and he could taste that light on his tongue, so all-encompassing was the moon’s glow. So sweet was she. She called his name, kindly, and beckoned him to come forward.

He went. The dream was a familiar one. He’d been this way over and over before.

At some point, he also realized that he wasn’t alone.

(Never had been — not in these dreams.)

A hand held his. Soft, long-fingered, and emitting the same radiant glow as the moon. He followed it with his eyes to a slim wrist, a silk sleeve, and then at last, a gentle, female face.

White eyes: peering back at him.

Their gazes met, and she smiled.

“You’ve finally come to look at the moon again,” whispered the girl, and gleamed with the light of a new dawn.

Then Aphelios awoke.

After Order’s defeat, Chaos died, too. For as the conflict of the gods only raged hotter, the being that was entropy incarnate drove his sword into the grave of Order, then vanished. Thus did he fulfill celestial balance — for neither could last long without the other.

But the whispers go that, in death, a new balance arose. In death, Chaos tore himself open, split his own body into innumerable aspects. These scattered, cast across the universe, where they went on driving the vestiges of their old enemy deeper into shadow. Wherever these pieces of Chaos went, they killed — dashed bright blood against the sky — choked out light wherever found burning still. Most delighted in the carnage. Darkness had been theirs for too long; now it was Order’s turn to know eternal night.

It was during this slaughter that Aphelios came to be.

“I pity you, little thing.”

Vladimir had said this, hunched over the pale corpses of Order’s acolytes. A beast he was, quickly clawing his way to kinghood. He loved mortal hearts, but the flesh and blood of the light-born pleased his sadistic hunger the most. He grinned, and silver blood streamed down his chin from the blunt jags of his teeth.

“The night is me… But pain. Pain becomes you. You might as well revel in it, you know. Bask in the sweetness of it, the…! Ahh, the delight. Don’t misunderstand, though. I still wouldn’t trade with you for all the worlds!”

Aphelios understood. He wouldn’t trade with himself, either. Unlike his darkling brothers and sisters, who continued the battle on Chaos’s behalf with sick glee…he was a statue. A stoppered bottle. A withdrawn, silent creature, who found no pleasure in battle — only never-ending duty.

Because, since primordial birth, Aphelios ruled pain.

Thrived in it. Blossomed in its presence.

The night-gods inflicted suffering unto those who clung to the light. And amidst their screams, Aphelios descended to increase it hundredfold. To take agony into his body, magnify it, and then exact it onto others. His was an anguished, lonely realm to rule.

Vladimir was right. What god would want this?

In the beginning, he even wept. Beings like them can be new once, too, and so in deific youth Aphelios had protested, fought, screamed. But the night-gods just laughed, save one. Rather, Lee Sin had leaned into his face. The steel of his jagged halo grew out from his eyes, and emitted a horrible heat that blistered Aphelios’s skin. Even so, it seemed a caress, compared to the utter coldness of the demon’s expression.

“Focus,” said Lee Sin. He did not flinch even when Aphelios vomited at his feet, fire-hot and acidic. Instead, he grabbed the god-boy’s face and forced his chin up. “Focus. You are weak, if even this much is unbearable.”

Rot-colored flowers bloomed under the blood moon’s light. Crushed and distilled, they brewed a poison unlike any other. Lee Sin filled another bowl with the fiery liquid, then brought it to Aphelios’s mouth.

“Empty yourself,” he commanded. “Become hollow. There is nothing but the pain inside you, which is pain you extend outwards unto our enemies. Beyond that, you do not exist. In not existing, you become a thing. An object, a weapon — our weapon. Do you understand? Of all our weapons, you are to be the deadliest, Aphelios. So, then.”

He tipped the bowl.

“Drink.”

The poison melted his esophagus, came up many more times still.

(At night, it stripped away the dreams. Abandoned him in a fogged, murky place — where even the moon could not reach.)

Yet even so: Aphelios drank.

The creatures of Chaos found him as a baby, miles below the earth. In the moonlit caverns, where crystals lit holographic like galaxies, and dark water pooled across the stone.

(Because they’d been in pursuit of the god-child, he heard them whisper too. The new Dawnbringer herself; the sun-daughter, the stargirl, birthed by Order’s dying light.)

“Frankly, I suggested we leave you there,” Vladimir remarked to fully-grown Aphelios, nonchalant. “I mean, really now! A baby! Sure, you might have made a decent snack for the road back… But honestly, Phel — infant’s blood? Pah. Overrated. Barely enough for a mouthful! And you were a fiend child no less, so it wasn’t as if you’d possess any of the finer notes of purity or, mmm, delectable innocence. Why, if Lee Sin hadn’t threatened to dash my face across the rocks I’d have been perfectly happy to let you lie!”

But they hadn’t, was the point. Instead, they brought him home. Despite Vladmir’s jibes, Aphelios knew that the forces of Chaos had snatched him up eagerly, not so careless as to question a gift such as he.

“God-children are rare,” said Lee Sin. “Even more so one birthed on our side.”

His lip curled, then, into a crueler, visceral snarl. Lowly, he added, “If the Dawnbringer had only turned out one of us… Ah, but there would be naught except darkness now. Such, such a shame.”

Aphelios curled into himself and said nothing. That night, he trained harder than ever. Glistening moonstone. A myriad of weapons. Slash. Blast. Again, and again, and again. Until the night lay in ribbons, and Aphelios felt as if bruises splotched him from the inside-out.

Again. And again.

Like a noxious cloud, the scent of poisonous flowers hung over him as he cut and dashed and rolled and shot. Sweat poured down ash-gray skin. His hair matted the sick violet of old blood.

Again.

Again.

He peered at his shadow, which coiled and uncoiled with the rhythm of practiced battle, and thought: See. I was born for this. Was made for pain and war. I am an empty bowl. A hollow jar. Filled with nothing that is myself. Only this. Only the night.

Again.

The moon, like a wide-open eye, kept watch over him. Silver light fell on his arms and set them softly aglow.

He’d stand beneath its gentle gaze forever, if only he could.

“What are you?”

The first time he dreamed of the moon, a girl had asked him this. He was a child. They both were. Seven at the most; hardly gods at all. He’d crouched in the grass and stared her in the face. She looked back, open-mouthed and openly curious.

“Your hair is like the sun setting. And your eyes! There are marks down your face…like you cried, and it left color…”

(She too had marks down her face. They arched below and above her eyes. Curved crescents — like the outlines of a full lunar cycle.)

The benevolent moon rose over the children, vigilant as a mother. She and the girl shone almost too bright for Aphelios’s nocturnal vision. He averted his gaze uncomfortably, and mumbled.

“Dream? No,” replied the girl, puzzled. “I’m having a meditation-vision. If anything, you’re my dream, silly.”

Aphelios bristled. The statement unsettled him deeply, and so to hide his discomfort he reverted to anger. He glared at the strange girl, shot to his feet, and shoved her — just to prove he could. She flailed and yelped as she fell onto her backside. There! Would he be able to do that, were he not real?

But much to his surprise, the girl burst out laughing. She clambered back to her feet and clapped the dirt off her robes. With an easy grin, she said, “Okay, okaaay. I guess I deserved that. Mm, maybe here I am just a dream… I’ll have to ask Karma about it. But, ah! Did you come to look at the moon, too?”

Embarrassed, and not insignificantly ashamed, he turned his face up in order not to look at her. Red eyes fixed on the silver moon above, whose beams brushed his face and ruffled his hair. Instantly, the fiend-boy felt his unease ebb away. His fear, turned to nothing: under the omniscient presence of the moon.

He looked back at the girl. Then, after another pause, he offered her a clawed hand.

The girl smiled. This time, the moon laughed with her.

Pain made it easy.

Pain simplified the act of killing. Made slaughter curt — routine, even.

Thus, numb, boiling hot in his belly, Aphelios slashed limbs from torsos and removed sobbing, shining heads from shoulders. Mindless, his body cycled through the motions. A perfected dance. Draw. Aim. Shoot. Draw. Hold. Cut. Nothing they did to him could make him falter. Nothing they tried made him stoppable. Every movement: a ceremony.

The Nightbringers’ greatest weapon, indeed.

The temple was once a wellspring of magical power. At least, so they told Aphelios.

“When the moons on this side of the Veil and on the other converge, the stones emerge to accept a single mage into their inner sanctums, to serve as conduit,” said the seers. “There is no other way to access this place. That is when it appears. That is when we strike.”

The dark goddesses peered into bloody scrying pools. There, they saw reflected onto the surface a looming black structure. Dug into the side of a frost-flinty mountain, carved with cracked holy sigils. Arcs like the empty eyesockets of titans towered into the stars: lifeless, yet ever-staring.

“Marus Omegnum,” whispered one seer-goddess, then spat into the scry-blood.

But more than that — they saw the Dawnbringer. Flanked by her fellow light deities, the god-child stood tall, certain. Even as a vision, her brilliance shot upwards from the black basin and illuminated the room. Demons cringed back, shielding their eyes, faces contorted in anguish and hate.

“Our master’s progeny. Our enemy’s bastard,” they screamed. “We will kill her. Burn her. Tear her apart. Change her! We will consume her as darkness consumes light, as it has since time immemorial!”

“They plan to awaken the old magicks,” another seer-goddess spoke. “To harness the power in Marus Omegnum, to turn the tide of this war. We mustn’t let that happen.”

“Aphelios!” rang the cry. “Send Aphelios! Cut out her sapphire veins! Blow off her shining head!”

“No, no, Aphelios,” Vladimir whispered into his ear, fervent with want. “Save a little for us.”

It didn’t matter. They had given him his task.

Aphelios could taste the poison already.

Order had no chance.

The dawn-gods took precautions, of course. No decent fugitive wouldn’t. But the demons set loose one of their monsters in response. So, as the hour of convergence struck, and the great black temple dissipated into existence as if from thick mist… A gargantuan, wormlike thing with rows of pitted teeth burrowed and burst through the stones of the floor, straight into the light-born’s midst. The night sprang forth to attack. And with them, Chaos descended.

Vladimir was overeager — slavering over the prospect of a god-child’s blood. He’d even dressed up for the occasion. He led the ambush in kingliest glory, his scarlet cape billowing, turned indigo by the moonlight. A woman’s shriek cut off when his fangs punctured her throat. At least Lee Sin was quick. Though shattering and pulpy-gory, merciful seemed the deaths under his fists in comparison.

For his part, Aphelios was dancing again. His mind floated. Adrift on a senseless sea. Caught somewhere between stars and the temple’s increasingly coppery air. With a dull, detached eye, he pulled a black trigger. Nearby, a dawn-goddess crumpled in a visceral spray. Then he exchanged the trigger for the blade. For the sickle. For the trigger again — and around him, bodies fell in a shower of heart-hot silver. All the while, his blood-irises roved.

Steel swords. Bare feet. Simple halos. Wailing mouths.

The Dawnbringer. Where was the Dawnbringer?

His fellow demons were busying themselves around the courtyard, preoccupied with the kicking, fighting bodies of the fallen and felled. So Aphelios went alone. Dawn-gods ran from him. Some tried to charge him. A few even succeeded in landing hits. He cut them down all the same, until a swathe of corpses trailed his twilight figure into the fortress.

Warriors, he noted dimly, and sliced through the skull of a day-soldier. Guards: an entourage to protect something. Or someone.

“Aphelios! Aphelios!” he heard raucous laughter behind him. His siblings had begun to rush after him. There was screaming everywhere. He forced his way through the innermost doors, ramming them until they and his clavicle splintered, and the screams heightened. Faintly, he heard the words they formed.

“The archoness, protect the archoness! Keep her sa—!”

He shoved a curved blade through the robed man. The body was heavy when flung aside. He kept his pain-filmy eyes sharp for the doe-legged figure of the Dawnbringer. Yet the deeper Aphelios went, the more dawn-gods he killed… The smaller shrank the certainty that she was here at all. She was not fighting. But they had the fortress surrounded. But she would never hide; it was not in their nature.

Had his siblings been wrong?

Who then was here if not the child?

By now, the temple grounds seemed much quieter. The last of the shining deities raised their hands. Tried to fend him off. Magical fire blasted into his face, threatened to melt his steel horns into his eyes. Aphelios seized the sorcerer (young, terrified, an adolescent god) by the neck and shot him between the ribs. No more fire after that. No more noise, either.

“One more! Only one more left?!”

Aphelios glanced. A hulking fiend more beast than man cackled, guttural and furious. It lifted its forearms and smeared bloody tusks across fur.

“And she is not the god-child! Order be cursed, we’ve been tricked!”

“You idiot!” another hissed. “Smell that, smell her blood! It’s another one, a different god-child! Nothing changes. We kill her too, leave the Dawnbringer with not a single ally by her side!”

“Yes! Yes! Kill her!” echoed the call throughout the room — filled now with nothing but dimmed bodies and enraged, ravenous dusk-hearts. Their voices seemed to fester and swell, until the noise pounded Aphelios’s ears from the inside-out, a thunderous barrage.

KILL HER. KILL HER. KILL HER. KILL HER.

Spurred thus, the beast-fiend roared and pounced. Numbed, Aphelios turned to witness the end.

White hair.

Radiant skin.

Shimmery, sun-silk robes.

And staring eyes: the color of the moon.

No thoughts; no hesitation.

Aphelios fired and the beast’s head burst like a star.

He had never been alone.

Not in his dreams, and not in the moonlit caverns of his birth.

Fugitive dawn-gods found them, deep in the underground. Fleeing into caverns from the hunger of Chaos, where moonbeams stitched through the eroded ceiling to shine upon the babes. It was the girl who drew them; the very light of her sparked the cave-crystals bright. When one of the acolytes uncovered the cloth that swaddled her, the baby burbled, and the wisps of her hair cast glimmering light over the water-pools. She peeked open her eyes and they were whiter than the fullest moon.

A lovely child she was, agleam with promise. “A new sister,” whispered the remnants of Order, and they approached to accept her into their fold.

But the creature that lay beside her stirred, babbled, and clung to his sister’s foot at the commotion. He poked his face out of his blanket. And what the fugitives saw made them snatch their hands back — as if even the reveal of him burned.

“Demon!” cried a cat-eyed woman with a wild mane. “One of Chaos’s! A fiend!”

Which he was. Wherever his sister’s light touched him, the dark pallor of his skin swallowed and stole it away. His hair was clumped and damp. Both irises smoldered hot, angry red. He was nothing they wanted to touch, not even when they pulled his sister from his side, and the fiend-babe began to cry at the loss.

“We must kill him,” the cat-woman hissed. “I will do it. Better now than to let him grow and gain a taste for our people’s blood!”

But, “No, Nidalee. We mustn’t,” said another woman. “He is only a child.”

A halo of holographic light revolved, slowly, behind her head. As she cradled the baby girl, the child grasped for one of her braids and the woman smiled, however brief.

“And he’s this one’s brother besides. A karmic bond ties them together, no matter what we may wish otherwise. It could doom us worse to tear them apart.”

“More than we have been already?” Nidalee shot back. “Your mercy would cost us our lives, Karma. The fewer of Chaos’s creatures are out there hunting us, the better chance we have to survive!”

Their argument, however, cut short when someone else approached. Iridescent hair streamed like a waterfall. From the waist down, she walked on the bird-bone legs of a doe. A ring of white gold revolved above her head and arched upwards, a crown and a lance both. The two women fell silent and watched as the Dawnbringer herself bent to look.

“…oh,” whispered the god-child. Blazing, sunburst eyes softened into something very much like sadness. “Two. Caught between night and dawn… Yes. Yes, I know your struggle, and your burden, little ones. I do.”

In the tunnels behind them, voices echoed into earshot, screeched and cackling. The Dawnbringer glimpsed back at the darkness, then at her followers around.

“This war between the gods, and the scales of its balance, will not be tipped by the existence of these two children. Only by the one,” she said, and the radiance of her seemed to dim, if only for a moment. “You may bring the girl with us. But leave the boy to Chaos. Perhaps, at best, they shall grow to never learn of the other, and thus be spared that anguish.”

The Dawnbringer stepped away from the stone dais, paused, and turned to stare sorrowfully at the swaddled fiend.

“And at worst,” she said, “you will have to make your choice. As I, too, must inevitably decide.”

He had sisters, of course. An uncountable number of them.

There was Camille, ebony exactor of relentless punishment. Then sweet, gruesome Evelynn, goddess of torture — then night-dove Zyra, ruler of the crawling wilds — then Morgana in her chains, howling for rebellion and revenge. And so, so many others, and so many brothers, for whom Aphelios had slewn whole worlds and razed them to ash. Not an eye batted, not a question asked. They were his family; he would die to protect them, and much worse as well.

So it was a simple thing to turn his gun on them now.

Like slipping into an old dance. Defend. Attack. Kill.

Protect protect protect.

They screamed at him as their black blood ran.

“Turncoat! Murderer!”

“He’s chosen! He’s decided his side!”

“After everything we’ve done for you! Traitor! TRAITOR!”

Aphelios didn’t hear any of it. Gore streamed down his face. His own breath rattled, and he struggled to keep his fingers wrapped around his blades. Pain. Pain. Pain. Through the razor-edged haze of the poison-trance, he noted offhandedly that he couldn’t feel his legs.

The last demon writhed on the floor. Shrieked at him when he advanced. “How dare you… How dare you! You turned your back on us…for this…? We will hunt you down, hunt you like a dog, till all hell breaks open at the end of—!”

He shot it.

Silence.

He breathed. Turned around, and scanned the room. Breathed.

All dead.

He looked at her.

The girl — the woman, now — looked back. Her snowy eyes were twins, peering upon him. The crescent markings on her face gleamed brilliant as mirrors.

Aphelios stared, and felt the cosmic glow of her scorch his retinas, and for the first time in eons twitched with the dim urge to cry.

He breathed. He didn’t know what to do.

“It’s you.”

And then she was running.

She dashed up to him, dashed through the blood and bodies and dark demon corpses, to hurtle straight towards him. Brighter than a comet, she slammed into his chest and he staggered, briefly, under the abrupt weight of her. She flung her arms around his neck. Pressed her face into the red silk of his scarf. Clutched him tighter than anyone ever had before.

(He thought she even wept. Just a little bit.)

“It’s you!” she exclaimed. Her voice was older, tentative — but familiar, too, somehow. “I know you. I saw you in my dreams, until one day I stopped…and when at last I asked, the moon told me who you were.”

Slow, awkward, he reached out and placed a hand on her elbow. The contrast between them was strange. Her, vivid and incandescent; him, dark and dusky ash. Her smile became a laugh at his hesitation. She hooked her fingers around his and held on tight. In the back of his mind, Aphelios felt as though he remembered the sensation.

Two children: standing in a field, gazing up at the moon. Faint as a dream.

“Oh. Oh,” she said, and the joy slipped from her face like ink into water. “I feel your pain… It goes so deep. Burns so terrible. My brother…my little twin. I’m so sorry.”

Her hands moved to his face, cupping his cheeks. Her touch was cool and warm and burning all at once. Aphelios dared not move.

She smiled again, and it was a shaky, mournful thing.

“I thought…” Her voice cracked. “I thought we’d have more time—”

And then the doors burst apart.

Order fights for light.

Chaos fights for darkness.

But in the moon, you have found both.

In me, you have found each other.

“BOY!” rose the layered, menacing bellow. Aphelios saw Lee Sin’s horns, broiling amidst the mass of demons. “You weak FOOL! You would betray your family as easy as THIS?!”

Behind him, the girl — the woman — his twin sister — pressed against Aphelios’s shoulders, back-to-back. Luminous magic scorched a half-circle before her, defending his blind spots. Sulfur-headed demons howled and lashed out. But not one dared cross her moonlit shield.

“I need to reach the inmost sanctums,” Aphelios, and only Aphelios, heard his sister whisper. “Please, we must hurry. There is not much time left!”

In his mouth, Aphelios tasted the tang of blood. Under that: the bitter poison. He nodded, once, and felt a squeeze around his elbow in reply. Lee Sin hissed, long and outraged.

“Give her to us,” he said, and his voice was low, sibilant. He paced a slow circle around the twins. But Aphelios knew the signs of rage brimming in blind fury’s embodiment — and indeed, Lee Sin’s fists clenched so taut, they sizzled with molten-yellow heat. “If you wish to leave this place intact, then start your amends by handing her over. Now.”

Aphelios kept his eyes on the fiends before him. In his periphery, he could see the entryway. On the far end of the corridor, two humongous doors smoldered dark as forge-fire. Only a thin, brilliant line of light spilled from the crack between. Yes. Yes, he could make it. They could.

“And here I never took you as one for dramatics, Aphelios. Well, well.”

Vladimir appeared next, sucking silver blood off his talons. He simpered at Aphelios and shook his head.

“What a pity now. Tsk. See, Lee Sin? Didn’t I tell you?”

He grinned huge and fanged and mocking.

“This entire mess could’ve been avoided if I killed him eons ago!”

Now.

Aphelios saw his chance and lunged.

He hauled the dawn-girl sideways and began firing; Lee Sin and Vladimir and the other fiends pounced; the temple suddenly shifted under their feet, shivering, shaking bits of mortar from its high walls. At this last, his sister gasped.

“No, no!” she shouted. “The severance has already begun! We’ll only have moments! Hurry!”

Aphelios didn’t understand. But he propelled himself forward, faster, anyways, pulling her by the arm, shielding her so that the teeth and claws and blades and gunfire that chased them ripped into his flesh instead of hers. Black fluid splashed in their wake. The numbness tingled less and less as if through a proper body, more and more as if he were a sack of meat. He was running on tendons and sinew. He felt nothing.

“There! There!”

The doors were cold and massive. The light within them bored right through his dusky eyes. His sister reached for it, and Aphelios braced his hand against her back, ready to shove her forward.

Then.

He remembered.

He realized.

He froze.

He understood, recoiled, and hated it.

He imagined holding her back instead, for just a moment.

(The thought fled as fast as it arrived and then he only felt ashamed.)

And finally: he saw the blow coming.

To the untrained eye, it would’ve seemed to have flown out from nowhere — would have taken them off-guard. But Aphelios could see. Where it aimed. Where it would arch through the air, where it would land. Where it would shatter the sorceress unrecognizable, and take her someplace even further away from him.

No. No, no.

Centuries-honed reflexes kicked in and he shoved his sister forward, right as a volcanic fist rammed into him.

An earth-splitting CRACK. A body slammed into the ground. His moonstone weapons were flung spiraling out of his hands, where they dashed, cracking, against the stones. Very, very dimly, he heard a world of demons laugh.

“Aphelios!”

Oh.

That felt different, somehow. His true sister — calling his name. Warm. It felt almost warm.

“My name is Alune!” she was shouting, and sounded as though she were in tears. “And I am with you! I am always with you! Aphelios, I am wi—!”

The slamming doors cut her off.

Still: a tiny wiggling thing, very akin to satisfaction, curled through his chest while the darkness pressed closer.

She was safe. She was safe.

It was all right now.

Against his ear, Lee Sin spat, “You were the best of us. I will destroy you for this.”

God-deaths are less rare than their birth. Aphelios uncurled his fingers. Ichor trailed across his forehead into stinging eyes, and his tunneling vision found the moon, where she drifted high above him and his kin and the whole wide world… Full and quiet as a promise.

Aphelios gazed up at her, exhaled, and felt her smile back.

Then underneath him, the temple went BOOM.

Fiends shrilled as the floor beneath them leaped, and the tremors jarred Lee Sin enough that his next blow missed and smashed through the stone floor instead. It was enough. A wave of fresh adrenaline surged up his veins, and Aphelios rolled out of the way to haul himself to his feet, however unsteady.

At the same time, his hair stirred — though there was no wind. The faintest sensation settled atop his shoulders — though there was no one behind him. Like two slim, cold hands; familiar hands.

“Aphelios.”

Tears in his eyes. An automatic reaction. He blinked them away and a voice stirred by his ear, fainter than air, soft as weeping.

“It suits you,” laughed Alune Alune Alune, oh-so-gently. “The name they’ve given. Oh, my brother. In your hand, from my heart… Crescendum. ”

The whirlpool chakram manifested directly into his hand. Conjured from purest moonlight, it scintillated the same red as his eyes.

The same red as a blood moon — under whom the rot-flowers grew.

Demons say that they belong to Chaos. Aphelios knew now that this is not true.

“The fortress looms around me,” Alune whispered. Marus Omegnum had faded into nothingness behind him when he ran; his sister was someplace fogged and murky now, a realm which Aphelios could never reach. “It is so quiet… So lonely. Yet I do not feel alone. From far across the Veil, our thoughts touch… Impossibly close. Through your eyes, through your heart — I see.”

A faint sensation: like someone’s hand, brushed feather-soft over the discolored essence of his soul.

“I see your hands,” said Alune. “I see the blood on your black fingertips…and the wounds on your heart. You make yourself a weapon, so you do not have to feel. For your family. For your people. For your own path, written in scars.”

She paused, and Aphelios heard her voice quaver.

“But you are not a weapon. You are my brother.”

Aphelios curled his fingers over his heart. Alune, you are my family, he thought, and then felt his blood rush with conviction so strong he almost became afraid. Almost. Almost.

“Oh,” said Alune. The sensation of hands wrapped around his thought, cupping it like a firefly. Aphelios shut his eyes. “Oh, Aphelios. When the moon told me who you were… I was frightened, brother. I did not know what to think. The Dawnbringer says creation must fall to either darkness or light. But I do not agree. I have always felt it within me, a shard of darkness, though born of light. And look! Inside you, though born of shadow… I see light.”

Where do we go from here?

“Our destiny is as the moon revealed, Aphelios. As beautiful… As terrifying…”

She sighed, and that small breath was a heavy anchor. Still, her next words came to him coated in steel.

“We are meant to hate each other. But now we will show them all, wicked and divine, that we are stronger together.”

Yes. Aphelios turned his gaze upwards, where the moon hung in a halo of dark blue against the night sky. It beamed down on him, and illuminated the path before him, so that dust and rock lit snowy gray and suddenly the way did not look as hard. Yes. Together.

“When your steps falter, follow my voice,” whispered Alune — or no. She was fading, the echo of her melding into the ambiance of nocturnal insects’ song. Her magic clung like ivy to the final traces of poison within the hollow of his bones. “From this fortress, I will guide you. I promise.”

Thank you.

“There is nothing to thank,” she answered, sorrowful. “It is your life upon the altar. I can only seek not to betray it.”

I know.

The swaying shadows of something familiar caught his eye, then.

Aphelios immediately went into the tall grass and crouched. Parting the weeds revealed a patch of clustered, grisly flowers. Their scent wafted up in curlicues, sickly sweet, slightly bitter. Under lunar ray, their color was purple as a bruise. He plucked one, a half-dead bloom, and already the sap from the broken stem tingled across his thumb, numbing.

He stood. The flower bled into his palm as he lifted it: an offering, as he now was, too.

“Even from across the celestial Veil,” Alune’s final words floated along the wind, “I will be with you.”

Aphelios crushed the petals, pushed a wordless prayer over his tongue, and smeared his eyelids blood-moon red.







Born from conflict: a force of wills.







From nothing, there will always come two.