Ill Omen's Light (Lux/Jinx)

Chapter 4: Descending Angels

Open your eyes, Little Light. You've been blind too long...

Stirring from fitful and dream-stained oblivion to a world of green-tinged darkness and acrid air biting at the insides of her nostrils, Lux sucked in a deep breath and immediately regretted it.

Her back was wedged against the corner of a crate, and she was sure there'd be a nasty bruise on her hip. But the lingering ache and discomfort and the pounding in her skull were the least of her problems.

At least the container had stopped moving, but...

The lighting, smoky and sickly, was wrong. The sounds – clunking and gurgling of strange machinery punctuated by shrieks of rusty metal – were wrong. The fumes clawed at her airways like she was breathing sewage, rotten eggs and metal, all somehow vaporized together.

This is all wrong – all wrong – Protector, where am I?

Straining to breathe the awful air without coughing, she crawled back over to the gaps in the wall and stared out.

Into darkness.

No moonlight. No cheerful Hextech lamps. No light at all, save for a kind of sickly yellow-green phosphorescence leaking from various bulbs and lanterns built into the ironwork walls of a truly hideous industrial storage yard.

Nothing she could imagine in the clean, well-appointed City of Progress she'd visited a few times as she grew into her role of Daughter of House Crownguard. No stately promenades, no lofty-but-cluttered libraries, no bustling engineering works.

This was rust and grime and filth.

This isn't Piltover.

Her stomach sank.

This is the Undercity – no. No, it isn't called just that, anymore, is it?

News travelled faster in the age of Hextech, and with much tutting at the 'price of reckless progress' and 'inevitable downfall of societies seduced by the arcane', the so-called 'Piltovan Turmoils' had been haughtily debated in Demacian court circles even as they ignored the stirrings of their own.

A new-old name, dragged from the city's ancient history like a waterlogged and vengeful corpse, had taken root since the Schism.

"Not the Undercity," Lux muttered, "Zaun. I'm in Zaun..."

Okay. Don't panic, Luxanna. Panic is unbefitting of a Crownguard.

I can do this. Find a way back up to Piltover, and head to the Academy - or bolt to the nearest Warden and hope to the Protector that Cait remembers me –

But first, Lux decided, she was getting out of this stupid crate.

Staring with razor-edged spite at her archnemesis, the container door, Lux envisioned the second sun rising – every ray of ambient light pouring toward her, feeding the supernova within.

Footsteps.

"Boss wants it all inspected here. Noxians 'good for their word' my ass. If they want our chemtech, they better get us raw materials worth the price-"

The bolts slid. The container door flung wide without her.

Curse it!

Three forms almost as hulking as the Noxian soldiers squished into the doorway. The first one had a shaven head covered in tattoos and slimy with sweat. His lower jaw vanished into a rebreather attached to tubes and pipes running into plates behind his shoulders. The glass parts of the contraption glowed that sickly puke-yellow; she wasn't entirely sure he still had a mouth.