The river in Ionia ran clear beneath the morning light.
Logan walked along its bank with Jinx at his side, their steps slow, unhurried, almost careless. He could hear water sliding over smooth stones, the soft hiss of reeds brushing together, the distant call of birds hidden among pale branches. Sunlight spilled through the leaves in broken gold, painting Jinx's hair, shoulders, and the side of her face in warm fragments.
She was talking.
He could not quite remember what she was talking about, but he knew it was something strange, fast, and bright. Maybe about a fish she had decided looked like an old Piltovan councilor. Maybe about building a tiny waterwheel out of spare parts just to see if it would annoy the spirits. Maybe about how Ionian food tasted too clean and needed more grease, more spice, or at least more explosions.
Whatever it was, she was smiling.
That mattered more than the words.
Logan watched her from the corner of his eye as they walked. Jinx had one hand behind her back and the other swinging loosely between them. Now and then, she kicked a pebble into the river and leaned forward to see how far it skipped. Her blue eyes followed every ripple with ridiculous seriousness, as if the fate of the world depended on whether the stone made it across the current.
She looked so alive here.
Not the sharp, frantic kind of alive she had worn in the past, when every laugh had been a spark near powder and every movement seemed one bad thought away from breaking into violence. This was different. Lighter. Not harmless, because Jinx would never be harmless, and he did not want her to be. But steadier. Warmer.
She had changed.
No, Logan thought, that was not quite right.
She had not become someone else. That was what people who did not understand her wanted. They wanted Powder back, or Jinx gone, or some simple girl they could forgive without doing the hard work of seeing the whole person. Logan did not love a memory. He did not love a version of her carved clean of pain and guilt.
He loved Jinx.
All of her.
The brilliant mind that could turn scrap into a miracle. The woman who could make a room feel alive the instant she stepped into it. The stubbornness that could have outlasted mountains. The affection she hid under bites, jokes, threats, and terrible drawings. The way she pretended not to care and then remembered every detail. The way she loved so fiercely that it frightened her.
She had learned to trust him.
That, more than anything, still made something ache in his chest.
In the beginning, she had looked at love like it was a trap with soft edges. She wanted it. Reached for it. Feared it. Bit it when it came too close. But slowly, day by day, argument by argument, embrace by embrace, she had begun to believe that he would stay.
She had grown.
She had fought herself in ways no one else saw. Held back when rage rose in her throat. Put down weapons she would once have fired without thinking. Learned to ask, sometimes badly, sometimes too late, but still ask. She had laughed without shattering afterward. She had cried without turning it into a bomb. She had let herself be held.
Logan loved her for every impossible inch of that progress.
Jinx turned suddenly and walked backward in front of him, arms spread wide for balance along the riverbank.
"You're staring," she said.
"I'm admiring."
"That's worse."
"How?"
"Staring is creepy. Admiring is smug."
"I can stop."
"No." She pointed at him. "Didn't say that."
Logan smiled.
She grinned back, bright enough to rival the river.
Then, for a moment, the light shifted.
It was subtle. A thin dimming at the edge of the dream. The trees remained. The river kept running. Jinx still walked backward ahead of him, her boots crushing soft grass, her braids swaying with each step.
But Logan's thoughts changed.
He remembered blood.
Not all at once. Not in a flood. Just one small thread, dark as ink in clear water.
Jinx laughing with smoke behind her.
Jinx running from fire.
Jinx holding weapons built by her own hands, eyes wild, mouth split in a grin that did not belong to joy.
Logan slowed.
She did not notice.
Of course she had changed, he thought.
But did change erase what came before?
The question slipped into him so smoothly that he did not recognize it as foreign. It sounded like his own reason. His own memory. His own grief sharpened into judgment.
She had killed people.
Not as an accident. Not once. Not in some clean little mistake that could be folded away beneath enough love and time.
Many people.
Enforcers. Criminals. Bystanders. People with names. People with families. People who had woken up one morning and never imagined their final moment would come from a blue-haired girl with a laughing mouth and a weapon too bright for the dark.
Logan's smile faded.
Jinx hopped onto a line of stones near the water and stretched her arms for balance. "Look. Perfect. I'm basically Ionian now."
The joke should have made him laugh.
Instead, he saw the council chamber. Smoke. Screams. Shattered glass. A rocket trailing blue fire through the night.
He remembered that she had not been born a monster.
Then another thought followed, colder.
Did that matter to the dead?
Jinx turned on one foot atop the stone, pleased with herself. Sunlight caught her eyes. Blue. Clear. Full of light.
Too much light.
The river whispered. The reeds hissed. The birdsong thinned until it almost sounded like voices far away, speaking beneath the world.
She had been hurt, yes.
Abandoned, yes.
Broken, used, twisted by grief, by fear, by Silco, by the weight of everything Zaun did to its children.
But pain did not resurrect the people she had killed.
Love did not make graves open.
Logan's hands curled slowly at his sides.
Jinx hopped from the stone back to the bank and walked toward him, still smiling. "You okay, hero?"
Hero.
The word soured.
How many times had he defended her? How many times had he pushed aside what she had done because he understood why she had become that way? Because he loved her? Because she was better now? Because the world had taken so much from her that asking her to pay for all of it felt like letting the cruelest parts of that world win?
But what about her victims?
What about their families?
What about all the people who did not get to be better later because Jinx had ended their later?
His breath grew heavy.
Jinx stopped a few steps away. Her smile faltered. "Logan?"
Something dark moved beneath the river's surface.
It was not a fish. Not a shadow from the branches. It stretched long and slow beneath the clear water, twisting against the current, and for an instant the river looked less like water than glass over an abyss.
Jinx did not see it.
She only watched him.
Those blue eyes.
So bright.
So full of everything he had protected.
The thought rose from somewhere deep, wearing his own voice now.
Maybe the world would be safer without that light.
Logan's jaw tightened.
No.
The denial came faintly, almost too faintly to hear.
But the anger pushed harder.
How much had that light burned? How many had died beneath it? How many times had those eyes widened with delight while something exploded, while someone screamed, while a city learned to fear the sound of her laughter?
Jinx reached for him. "Hey, you're scaring me."
He looked at her hand.
Small. Familiar. Warm, he knew, though she had not touched him yet.
A hand that had built gifts.
A hand that had held his.
A hand that had pulled triggers.
The river darkened.
His own heart seemed to answer it.
He wanted to say something. Something cruel. Something final. Not because he believed it, not fully, but because the pressure behind his ribs demanded a shape. The words gathered like poison under his tongue.
He wanted to tell her that he was tired of forgiving blood.
He wanted to ask if she remembered every face.
He wanted to say that those eyes had no right to shine so brightly.
He wanted to extinguish that light in her eyes forever.
He wanted—
"No."
The voice cut through the dream.
Soft, firm, and impossibly close.
Logan froze.
Jinx's face blurred.
The river tore open without sound.
The world fell away.
Ahri held him in the dark.
They were in the endless black of the Void, thick and lightless, pressing from every direction without air, without ground, without horizon. They were not standing, not falling, not floating in any way that obeyed sense. They simply existed there, two small figures suspended in a place that hated existence.
Ahri had both arms wrapped around Logan, holding him close enough that there was no space between them. His body was cold. Too still. His eyes were closed, his expression strained by whatever dream the Void had woven through his sleeping mind.
Her forehead rested against his.
"No," she whispered again. "Do not think that way."
The corruption recoiled for a breath, then surged back.
Ahri felt it before she saw it. A pressure gathering beneath his memories, turning warmth into accusation, guilt into hatred, love into a blade aimed inward and outward at once. It did not create from nothing. The Void was more skillful than that. It found cracks already there. Questions. Fears. Contradictions. The unbearable weight of loving someone who had done terrible things, and knowing both truths were real.
It knew exactly where to press.
Of course it did.
The Void did not need to understand love to poison it.
Black-violet threads crawled along Logan's skin, sank beneath it, then rose again like roots searching for a way into the heart. Ahri tightened her hold on him and drew them into herself.
The memory came with them.
Jinx by the river. Jinx smiling. Jinx becoming every crime she had ever committed. Logan's love twisted into judgment. His tenderness rotted into the desire to snuff out the blue light in her eyes.
Ahri swallowed the memory whole.
It burned, not because it could corrupt her, but because memories always carried shape. Taste. Emotion. The Spirit Blossom law answered through her divinity, breaking down the dream before it could settle into Logan's soul. The hatred dissolved against her origin power, scattered into pale fragments, and vanished.
For a few breaths, Logan's expression eased.
Ahri did not relax.
This had happened again and again.
The Void changed its mask, but the direction remained the same. It showed him destroying his friends. It gave him visions of ending nations with a thought. It placed power in his hands and filled his mind with reasons to use it. Piltover. Zaun. Noxus. Ionia. The Freljord. Shurima. All of them had appeared in fragments, twisted into threats, burdens, stains that needed to be erased.
But the most frequent dream was always Jinx.
Again and again.
Her smile. Her eyes. Her crimes. His love. His fear. His guilt. The temptation to end the contradiction by ending her.
The Void knew where to corrupt.
Ahri could admit that much.
This was not the same corruption Logan had endured while fighting the false Watchers. That had been terrible, yes. Violent. Vast. But it had still been like standing near a storm and resisting the wind.
This was the storm's birthplace.
The true Void had no need to imitate pressure. It was pressure. No need to spread darkness over the world. It was darkness without a world. Here, corruption did not arrive as an attack from outside. It soaked into thought before thought understood itself. It pressed against memory, desire, identity, every place where a person believed they were strongest.
There was nothing around them.
That bothered Ahri more than she wanted to admit.
When Logan severed the affected space from Runeterra, part of the Freljord should have been swallowed with them. Ice. Stone. Snow. Ruined land. Some physical fragment to mark where they had entered.
But Ahri saw none of it.
No ground. No frozen cliffs. No shattered battlefield suspended nearby. Only the two of them in endless black, as if the Void had taken the rest somewhere else, or had consumed it before she could notice.
She could not chase that question now.
Logan stirred faintly.
Ahri pressed her forehead more firmly to his. "Stay with me."
He did not wake.
Another pulse of corruption gathered.
She felt it forming inside his dream before the images became clear. Blue hair. Riverlight. Blood. Love curdling toward disgust.
Ahri closed her eyes.
Not again, she thought.
Then she reached in.
Her origin power flowed out, softer than flame, brighter than the black could tolerate. It entered the place where the dream had begun to rot and pulled the poisoned memory free before it could take root. For an instant, Jinx's face appeared inside Ahri's mind, smiling, then screaming, then laughing through smoke, then looking at Logan with frightened blue eyes as his own thoughts turned against her.
Ahri absorbed it.
Her breath caught.
The memory dissolved.
A little more of her power went with it.
She had already spent around half of her origin power in the battle against the Watchers. Summoning that level of divine force, restraining monsters born from nightmares older than most civilizations, tearing through Void-touched resistance, none of it had been light work. She had entered this place far from full strength.
Now she was spending what remained to protect Logan's mind.
She could continue for a long time. That was true. She was not fragile, and as a Spirit Blossom god, the Void's corruption did not take her the way it tried to take him. Its whispers slid over her without finding the same purchase. Its hunger could press close, coil around her tails, crawl through the dark around her skin, but it could not simply invade her and remake her.
So long as she held herself steady, she could focus on Logan.
That was the only task that mattered.
But long was not forever.
If her origin power ran dry, she would no longer be able to consume the negative memories forming inside him. She might still hold him. She might still speak. She might still resist the dark herself.
But she would not be able to stop it from reaching him.
Ahri looked at his face.
One of the beings with the greatest potential she had ever seen. A man who had reached across laws, spirits, nations, and impossible powers, not because he was pure, but because he was relentless. Because he loved too deeply. Because he refused too many endings. Because he carried contradictions the way others carried weapons.
The Void was always more dangerous when it corrupted the strong.
Ahri did not want to imagine a corrupted Logan.
So she did not.
She had no room for that fear.
"Listen to me," she whispered against him. "That is not your thought. That is not your love. That is not what you want."
The darkness around them seemed to thicken.
Ahri ignored it.
"Jinx is not only what she has done. You know that. You know her better than anyone. You know how hard she has fought to stay, to heal, to choose something other than the worst voice in her head."
Logan's brow tightened.
Another dream began.
Ahri saw Ionia again.
The river. The sunlight. Jinx walking backward, smiling. The corruption had grown more subtle this time. It did not rush immediately toward blood. It let the warmth linger. Let Logan remember her laughter. The way she leaned against him when she pretended not to be tired. The way she would steal food from his plate and then deny it while chewing. The way she looked when she thought no one was watching and allowed herself to be peaceful.
Then the dream turned.
A flash of explosion. A body falling. Jinx's smile made cruel by memory rather than truth.
Ahri drew it in before the hatred could bloom.
She held Logan tighter.
"She loves you," Ahri murmured. "Clumsily. Fiercely. With too many teeth and too much fear, perhaps. But she loves you. And you love her."
The Void pressed.
Ahri continued.
"She is waiting for you. She will be furious. She will build something reckless. She will blame herself for not being here, then pretend she is not afraid. You know she will. You know the look she makes when she is trying not to cry."
Logan's breathing changed slightly.
Not waking.
But listening, perhaps.
Ahri let her voice become softer.
"She has changed because you reached for her, but also because she chose to reach back. Do not let this place steal that from you. Do not let it turn love into a weapon against the person who gave you so much of herself."
For a moment, the corruption slowed.
Ahri felt the shape of the dream shifting, uncertain, unable to decide whether Jinx should be a wound, a crime, a victim, or a home.
Good.
Ahri poured more origin power through the connection, careful not to crush the memory itself. That was the delicate part. She could not erase every painful thought from Logan's mind. That would not save him. That would only hollow him out in a different way. He needed his memories whole. Joy and grief. Love and doubt. Forgiveness and consequence.
She only removed the poison.
The Void tried to make him hate what he loved.
Ahri would not allow it.
Minutes passed, or hours, or no time at all.
There was no way to measure anything here. No sun. No moon. No heartbeat of the world beneath them. Only Logan's faint breathing, the slow drain of Ahri's power, and the recurring tide of corruption searching for a path into him.
Each time, she met it.
Each time, she whispered.
She told him about Jinx's laughter by the Ionian river. About her stubborn hope disguised as mockery. About the way her blue eyes lit up when she was building something impossible. About the trembling courage it took for a broken person to choose trust again. About Vi, waiting too, because love did not belong to only one shape. About the Twin Cities, where people would already be moving, fighting, planning, refusing to let him vanish.
She spoke until her own voice felt distant.
Then the dream returned again.
Jinx by the water.
Logan's hand tightening.
The wish to extinguish the light in her eyes rising from the dark.
Ahri opened her mouth before the thought could finish.
"No."
She absorbed the dream as memory once more, swallowed the hatred before it could become Logan's, and held him in the endless black with her forehead pressed to his.
And if all those dreams came true, and I were the only thing you had left? she thought.
...
Nah.
...
The corruption could not affect Ahri.
...
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