SCARS

Somewhere, Someone

Koran had been a chief Enforcer for twenty years now. Twenty long years of watching people slip between the cracks of Piltover, running from things they couldn't outrun. Sometimes it felt like the whole place—topside and undercity both—was a leaking ship, and he was just one of the many patching holes, knowing it would never really hold.

Koran's office was always cluttered. It wasn't that he was messy—he wasn't—but that the papers had a way of piling up, stacking on top of each other until they filled his desk, creeping up toward the lamp that barely illuminated the room. It wasn't just the reports, though; it was the weight of them, the stories of people lost and gone, packed into tidy folders, like life itself could be neatly filed away. But life wasn't neat, he knew. It spilled out, leaked from the corners of files like this one.

The Novast case had sat on his desk for weeks, an old story wrapped in a conclusion. Corbin Novast and his wife, two names that once carried power, influence—until they were no more. The city had been quick to move on. People in Piltover had a way of forgetting things, especially things they didn't want to remember. Corbin was dealt with, that's how the report put it, and that should have been that.

Koran flipped the folder open. The usual details, the formal tone of bureaucratic precision, the kind that glossed over anything uncomfortable. He'd read it before. Skimmed it, really. He was good at that. Glance through, pull the important details, let the rest fall away like dead leaves in autumn.

But tonight, something had him lingering.

His fingers traced the photograph stapled to the corner of the page—one of the estate after the raid. He'd seen it a hundred times: the broken windows, the marble floor, the overturned chairs. The remnants of wealth and power, stripped bare. But his eyes drifted to the far left, where a cracked door opened just slightly into the next room. And there, just barely in frame, was a portrait.

Koran leaned closer. The painting was of the Novast couple but there was a girl, wide-eyed and small, with an innocence that made her stand out against the cold backdrop of her smiling parents. Her gaze followed him, as if she was watching, even through the portrait.

Something in him stirred. It wasn't anything he could name, but the way her eyes seemed to call out from the corner of the frame made him pause. He shuffled through the file again, searching for the girl's name. The report claimed no survivors—just Corbin and his wife. Yet here she was. He turned the photo over, as if expecting an answer to appear on the back.

But no. It was just a picture. A moment captured in the aftermath, forgotten like everything else.

Still, he couldn't shake it. There had been rumors, whispers about Corbin's daughter—Calypso. He hadn't paid much attention at the time. A child, lost in the chaos, assumed to have perished along with her parents. But now, the doubt gnawed at him. He flipped back through the reports, skimming over the sterile language, the neatly filed statements. It didn't sit right, the way her name wasn't mentioned. How could a child just disappear?

He sat back, the chair creaking under his weight. For the first time in months, the tidy resolution of the case felt fragile, thin, like a veneer that could crack if you pressed hard enough. Koran pressed. He pulled out another file, one from the week after the Novast case, then another. The same story, but each time, more pieces missing, more details glossed over.

It wasn't until hours later, his eyes bleary, that he found what he was looking for: a brief mention of a child in one of the reports, a single line buried deep in the paperwork. "A daughter, unaccounted for."

Unaccounted for.

Koran sat up, the words prickling at his skin. She hadn't died. He was sure of it now. The girl in the painting—Calypso Novast—was still out there, somewhere.