SCARS

The Edge of Belief

Calypso's eyes fluttered open, her body stiff and aching, and for a moment, she didn't know where she was. The air was heavy, sharp with the sterile, metallic scent of stone and steel. She was lying on a cold surface—concrete, perhaps. Her head was spinning, slow and thick, like she had been in some kind of fog for days.

Her arms felt heavy, her fingers sluggish as they moved over her body, instinctively searching for any sign of injury. The bruises were already starting to form on her arms—purple, yellow, the darkening marks of something rough, something deliberate. She winced as she touched one on her ribs, the dull ache shooting up through her chest. It was a jarring reminder of how she got here, of the things she couldn't quite remember, not fully.

Her body felt like it had been through a war she couldn't place, the kind of exhaustion that comes from a long, brutal struggle, only to wake up in the aftermath, uncertain of what exactly had happened to get her here. But there was a hollowness in the pit of her stomach, a sense that things didn't add up. She should remember more. She should.

Her fingers traced the edges of her injuries, the deepening bruises, the soreness that still held her body hostage. The night before—there was something she couldn't quite place about it. She had been with them—Lyra and Silco in some kind of office looking place. They had taken her, hadn't they? The memory came back slowly, like a fog lifting, revealing something raw and unwelcome. The sharp edges of their faces, the hardness of their eyes as they had hurt her, like they had to break her to make her fit into whatever strange plan they had woven together.

She remembered pain. She remembered them, the cold cruelty of their hands, the way they had trapped her in a moment she couldn't escape from. But the details—they slipped through her fingers like water. She couldn't grasp them fully. She could feel the remnants of it—the exhaustion, the way her body seemed to be rebelling against her—but the how and the why of it still eluded her.

Suddenly, the realization that she wasn't in Zaun anymore, but in Piltover, hit her like a sharp breath she had been holding too long. She was no longer in that office with Lyra and Silco—no, now she was in a cell. A Piltover cell. The walls were too high, the silence too clean, too cold. The air smelled different here—sterile, almost unnatural. The bars felt solid, unforgiving.

She let her head fall back, her eyes tracing the dim light spilling in through the narrow window above her, far out of reach. How did she get here? It didn't matter how many times she blinked, or how her pulse fluttered in the silence—it didn't change what she already knew. She had been taken. No–she had been taken twice. First by Lyra and then by...

As if a veil had lifted, the memory returned in fragments—the Enforcer. The man. The one who had come to take her.

She could see him clearly now, standing just beyond the shadow of Lyra's smug smile. He had looked at her, at Silco and Lyra, and said something about keeping up his end of the deal. A deal she had no part in, but was somehow a part of. She hadn't understood it at the time, but she knew now: Silco and Lyra had given her to him. They had delivered her, like some kind of sacrifice, like a thing to be traded. It was as if she was nothing more than an object to them, a pawn in a game she didn't understand.

Her breath caught as she remembered how the Enforcer had told her, "I'll take you back." And she had refused him. She had said, "No," as if the word alone could change anything. She remembered the desperation in her own voice, the wild hope, "someone's coming for me". She had believed that Vi was coming, the certainty of it in her bones. She had believed in it so fiercely. Vi.

And then, despite her protests, despite everything she had said, that enforcer had dragged her up into this cell. He had said—so matter-of-factly—that for justice to be brought, Calypso needed to be in Piltover, in a prison. It wasn't about her innocence, or her guilt, or even her father. It was just about the system, the law, the order they wanted to impose. He had said it so simply, so clearly. And in that moment, everything else had blurred, until the last thing she remembered was the cold steel of the bars, the last breath of freedom slipping through her fingers as he locked her away.