POV - MORGANA
The pain of this realisation was a silent knife.
As I floated in that abyss of comprehension, the darkness before me began to stir again. The void was not finished with me. There was more.
It was not a sound.
It was as if the void itself moved, breathing around me with lungs made of absence. Expanding to receive me. Contracting to trap me. The sensation reminded me of pressure at the bottom of the ocean, only here there was no water, no bottom, no top. Only a space between thoughts, where even silence seemed to be waiting for something.
But this time, nothing came to drag me into another life.
The void remained empty. Quiet. As if giving me a moment to breathe, or perhaps just waiting for me to ask the right question.
And the question came. Not as words, but as a need aching in the centre of what remained of me.
The question echoed in the nothingness, reverberating against walls that did not exist.
I had witnessed so much. The dragon hunted for greed, her scales torn off one by one by hands that saw value only in what they could sell. The slimes massacred for their innocence, their peaceful existence reduced to 'resources' and 'experience points'. The baby discarded like rubbish in a dark river because even maternal love has limits that misery can break. Elyon, the purest light that ever existed, chained and drained by the very humanity he tried to save.
And between them, fragments of other lives, flashes of pain that passed too quickly for me to process, yet slowly enough to leave marks I knew would never disappear.
A slave in an empire of sand, branded like cattle, sold seven times before she turned fifteen, and killed on the eighth because she dared look her master in the eye.
A healer in a forgotten village who saved hundreds from the plague only to be burned as a warlock when the sickness finally receded, because someone needed to be blamed for the delay.
A child soldier in a nameless war, forced to wield a sword larger than her own body, killed not by the enemy but by her own commander when she refused to execute prisoners.
A scholar who discovered truths the powerful wanted buried, and was buried along with them, her books burned, her name erased from history as if she had never existed.
A son sold by his own mother to feed the other children who died of fever that same winter. And the sold son died after being used and abused by the lord who bought him.
A political prisoner who rotted in a damp cell for thirty years, forgotten by the world she once swore to change, released only when nothing of her remained to be free.
A child born 'wrong' in the eyes of his village, eyes of a different colour, hair of a different shade, any difference sufficed, thrown from a cliff onto a pile of stones.
And more. And more. And more.
Betrayals by lovers. Cruelties of strangers. Indifference of crowds. Wars waged for pride and ended upon mountains of bodies that never asked to fight. Famines that turned neighbours into predators. Plagues revealing the cowardice of those who swore protection. Revolutions devouring their own children. Empires built on bones and maintained by fear.
Human rot in all its forms. Pettiness, greed, fear turning into hatred, hatred turning into violence, violence becoming routine until no one remembered how to live without it.
And in every life, in every body, in every name she carried and then abandoned in the ashes of what was, Azra'il was there. Witnessing. Suffering. Dying.
Reborn to suffer again.
The question emerged from somewhere deep, not from the mind, but from something more essential. It was almost childish in its simplicity, the sort of question children ask before learning that some answers are too heavy to carry.
But I needed to know.
All these lives. Countless bodies, names, faces, places. And all I had seen was suffering woven in infinite variations, the same tapestry of pain with threads of different colours.
It is not possible, I wanted to believe. It cannot be only this.
Because if it were, if Azra'il's existence was merely an endless cycle of birth, suffering, and death, repeated until the concepts themselves lost meaning, then what remained? What kept her walking? What stopped her from simply... giving up?
The question hurt more than the images I had witnessed. Because love was the only thing I knew capable of giving meaning to suffering. It was what kept me standing when Kayle betrayed me. It was what made me descend into the shadows of Noxus and Zaun to protect those no one else saw. It was the golden thread I held onto when everything else seemed darkness.
Not the conditional love of those wanting something in return. Not the possessive love of those confusing ownership with care. But true love, the kind that sees the cracks and chooses to stay, that knows the shadows and does not flee from them.
The thought unfolded into another. Closer. Sharper.
By me.
Doubt was a cold blade sliding between my ribs.
I had taken her in. Cared for her. Called her daughter. But had I done enough? Had I crossed the walls she built over millennia, or merely scratched the surface whilst convincing myself I was making a difference?
I told her I loved her, I remembered. But saying is not the same as making one feel. And she had spent so long feeling nothing but loss...
Doubt was a new weight, different from the pains I had witnessed. Those were hers. This one was mine.
Does she know? Does she believe it?
The void did not answer. But something changed. At the edge of my perception, if indeed there were edges in that place, something began to glow. At first, I thought it was merely a trick of the darkness, the kind of illusion the mind creates when deprived of stimuli for too long. But the light persisted. Grew. Multiplied.
Spheres.
Small at first. Distant. Like stars being born on the horizon of a sky that had never known dawn. They floated in the darkness with a softness that seemed impossible in that place of brutal memories, moving not with the urgency of previous visions, but with the calm of precious things that know their own value.
I moved closer. Or perhaps they moved closer to me. The distinction did not matter in that space where distance was merely a suggestion.
And then I saw.
Inside each sphere, scenes moved. Not like the memories forced upon me before, not like waves dragging me down and drowning me. These were different. They were... kept. Protected. Like jewels in reliquaries of light.
In the nearest one, I saw Azra'il, not the child I knew, but another version, in another body, in another world, laughing. Laughing. The sound did not reach me, but I could see the way her face transformed, how her eyes crinkled with the force of joy, how her entire body seemed to vibrate with something I had never seen in her: lightness.
In another sphere, she sat by a campfire, head resting on someone's shoulder I couldn't see clearly. Her posture was relaxed. Trusting. The kind of vulnerability that only exists when we feel completely safe.
In yet another, interlaced hands. Fingers that knew each other well enough to find their place without hesitation.
Happy memories, I realised, and the relief that flooded me was almost devastating. She has happy memories.
There were not many. Compared to the ocean of pain I had traversed, they were drops. But they existed. They shone. They persisted.
She kept this, I understood. Somewhere inside her, she protected these moments. Chose to preserve them when she could have let the darkness consume them.
This meant something. It meant that despite everything, despite every betrayal and every loss and every death, a part of her still believed it was worth remembering. That light, however rare, deserved to be kept.
As I watched the spheres float around me like a shoal of small suns, one of them began to move differently from the others.
It approached me.
Not with the passivity of the rest; this one came with intent. As if it had chosen me. As if it knew I needed to see it specifically.
Its light was warmer than the others. More golden. And when it stopped before me, so close I could touch it had I hands, I saw what lay inside.
Movement. Colours. A scene pulsing with life, waiting to be witnessed.
I extended what remained of me, this formless consciousness, this echo of who I was, towards the golden sphere. And as I drew near, the light swallowed me like warm water, dissolving the edges between observer and observed until there was no distinction left.
The world bloomed around me.
----------
💬 Author's Note
----------
I know this chapter ended up shorter than usual, but this one is more of a doorway than a destination.
Think of it as the quiet moment before another set of memories begins.
Until now, Morgana has mostly witnessed the darker parts of Azra'il's existence, the suffering, the countless lives that ended in tragedy. And while those memories are part of who Azra'il is, they are not the whole story.
Her life across countless worlds was not made only of pain.
There were moments of warmth.
Moments of laughter.
Moments where, for a brief while, existence did not feel like a burden.
They were rare. Far rarer than the suffering.
But they existed.
And Azra'il chose to keep them.
Out of everything she could have forgotten, everything she could have allowed the darkness to swallow, those memories remained, preserved somewhere deep inside her like small lights in an endless night.
The next chapters will explore some of those memories.
Not all of Azra'il's past is tragedy.
A few pieces of it… are precious.