The shelter was ugly, but it stood.
Taliyah had made it fast, pulling long slabs of stone from beneath the sand and bending them into low walls. She had left gaps for air, shaped the roof into overlapping plates, and packed the seams with gravel until the wind stopped cutting through. It was barely a camp. But in the middle of the Sai Kahleek, with a sandstorm grinding the world into a brown blur, was good enough.
Inside, the refugees huddled close together.
There were too many of them.
Taliyah had stopped counting after the first hundred. Families from small villages near old trade roads. Caravan guards who had lost their merchants. Children from a town Xerath had split open with lightning. An old priest who had not spoken since the temple behind him became glass. A mother with two sons and no husband. A boy carrying a cracked water jar as if it were the last piece of his life.
They had all come from places Xerath had touched.
Touched, burned, broken, left behind.
Master Yi, Jax, and Karma were still chasing him across Shurima. Taliyah wanted to help them. Part of her ached every time she imagined Xerath walking free while she was here stacking stone and calming frightened children.
But someone had to protect the people he left behind.
So she stayed.
"Water first for the children," she said, raising her voice over the storm. "Small sips. Don't waste it. We'll move once the wind drops."
A man with a bandaged arm nodded and passed the order along.
The shelter groaned.
Sand battered the walls like fists.
Taliyah placed her palm against the stone and felt the pressure through it. The roof held. The western wall had shifted slightly, but not enough to crack. She closed her eyes, reached down, and pulled a new rib of rock up beneath it. The wall settled with a heavy scrape.
A little girl nearby stared at her.
"Are we safe?" the girl asked.
Taliyah wanted to say yes.
Instead, she crouched and tucked the girl's scarf tighter around her face.
"We're safer than we were."
The girl accepted that. Children in Shurima learned the difference early.
Then Taliyah felt the sand move wrong.
...
Something underneath.
She stood.
The sensation came again, a ripple beneath the surface, then another, then three more. Fast. Hungry. Erratic.
"Taliyah?" the bandaged man asked.
"Everyone stay inside."
He looked toward the doorway.
"What is it?"
"Xer'Sai."
The word moved through the shelter faster than the storm.
Someone whimpered. Someone cursed. A baby began crying.
Taliyah stepped outside.
The storm hit her at once. Sand scraped across her cheeks and sleeves. She pulled her scarf higher and narrowed her eyes. Visibility was terrible. Ten steps away, the world became a wall of dust. The sky was gone. The sun was gone. Only the ground spoke clearly.
And the ground was screaming.
The first Xer'Sai burst from the sand to her left.
Taliyah twisted her foot and kicked up a stone blade. The creature slammed into it chest-first, shrieked, and split the rock with its claws. It was thinner than Rek'Sai's brood usually were, its hide stretched tight, its movements too wild. Frenzied.
Another came from the right.
Taliyah slid back on a rising sheet of stone. The creature missed her by a handspan and tore through the place where her leg had been. She threw both arms forward. A wave of rock surged from the ground and struck it under the jaw, flipping it into the storm.
"Come on," she muttered. "Away from them."
She moved farther from the shelter.
No matter what came, no matter how many, she had to keep the fight away from the refugees.
Three more shapes cut through the sand.
Taliyah ran toward them.
She stomped once, hard. Stone spikes rose in a crooked line, forcing the Xer'Sai apart. One leapt over them. She ducked, felt claws pass over her head, and slammed her heel down. The ground folded upward like a breaking wave. The creature hit the stone face and vanished beneath collapsing sand.
The second circled.
The third went for the shelter.
Taliyah's breath caught.
"No."
She threw herself onto a slab of rock and rode it across the ground. Sand whipped past her eyes. The Xer'Sai was already close enough that she could see its hooked claws digging toward the shelter wall.
Taliyah reached out.
The stone beneath the creature's feet turned soft, then snapped shut around its legs. It shrieked and thrashed. She pulled both hands back. A pillar of rock drove upward and carried the trapped Xer'Sai into the air before throwing it into the dunes.
The shelter shook from the impact.
Inside, people screamed.
"I said stay inside!" Taliyah shouted, though she knew fear did not listen well.
The remaining Xer'Sai came in at once.
She stopped thinking in full sentences.
Step. Pull. Turn. Raise the wall. Drop the floor. Break the ridge. Push the wave.
Her body knew the rhythm. The stone answered. A claw cut her sleeve. A tail struck her shoulder and knocked her to one knee. She spat sand, rolled aside, and dragged a line of sharp rock across the creature's belly.
It collapsed with a wet hiss.
The last Xer'Sai retreated under the sand.
Taliyah did not chase it.
She stood still, breathing hard, feeling for movement.
The storm filled the silence.
Then the ground shook.
Not like before.
Deeper.
Slower.
Farther away.
Taliyah turned toward the southeast.
At first she saw nothing. Just sand. Just storm. Just the same dirty wall that had swallowed the horizon for hours.
Then lightning flickered somewhere above the clouds, and for half a heartbeat, the shape appeared.
Huge... too huge.
A dark mass moved behind the storm, taller than any Xer'Sai she had ever seen, its outline broken by spikes and impossible angles. It vanished again when the light died, but the ground continued to tremble with each step.
Taliyah's mouth went dry.
Another flash.
Closer now.
The creature was coming straight toward them.
She backed up one step, then stopped herself.
Behind her were the refugees. The children. The wounded. The people who had already run from Xerath and could not run again in this storm.
Taliyah lifted both hands.
The earth beneath her answered, but it felt small compared to the thing approaching through the sand.
She swallowed her fear and raised a ridge between the shelter and the southeast.
Then another.
Then another.
Stone walls tore out of the desert, one behind the next, forming a rough barrier across the creature's path. The storm swallowed the tops of them. For a moment, Taliyah heard only wind.
Then something struck the first wall.
The impact cracked it from base to crown.
Taliyah clenched her teeth and reinforced the second.
Another blow.
The first wall shattered.
Stone fragments vanished into the storm.
The shape kept coming.
Taliyah stepped forward.
"Not them," she whispered.
She pulled every loose stone she could feel beneath the sand. Rocks rolled, rose, and gathered around her in a rough orbit. The ground at her feet buckled upward, lifting her onto a moving slab.
The second wall broke.
The third held for one breath, then bent inward.
Taliyah drove her platform forward.
The creature emerged enough for her to see a massive limb, a jagged head, and a mouth full of darkness.
...
She threw the first barrage.
Boulders slammed into the shape and burst against its hide. It slowed, but did not stop.
Taliyah rode left, raised another wall, and sent a wave of stone into its legs.
The creature roared through the storm.
The sound hit her bones.
Behind her, the shelter lights flickered behind the sand.
Taliyah planted both feet, spread her arms, and dragged a long spine of rock from the desert floor.
The giant shadow charged.
She met it head-on, shaping the stone higher, thicker, harder, anything to keep that thing from reaching the people behind her.
Then the sand beside her shifted.
Taliyah snapped her hand toward it, ready to tear another ridge from the ground, but stopped.
A Xer'Sai emerged from the storm.
It was not like the others.
Its claws were low. Its head was bowed. It did not lunge, hiss, or dig toward the shelter. It simply stood there, half-buried in the sand, its strange body trembling as if something else were holding it still from far away.
Taliyah kept one hand raised.
The Xer'Sai's mouth opened.
The voice that came through it was not its own.
"Young stoneweaver," it said, smooth and distant beneath the storm. "Withdraw."
Taliyah's blood ran cold.
The giant shape struck her newest wall. Cracks tore through the stone.
She clenched her fist and forced the wall to hold.
"I can't."
"You cannot win."
The Xer'Sai's head twitched. Its eyes stared at her without hunger, without frenzy, without life of its own.
"That thing is Cho'Gath. You do not understand what is approaching."
Taliyah swallowed sand and fear together.
Behind her, the shelter shook. The refugees screamed again.
She looked at the strange Xer'Sai, then toward the massive shadow tearing through her defenses.
"Then I'll slow it down."
The voice was quiet for a moment.
"Stubborn."
Taliyah planted her feet.
The next impact shattered the wall completely.
The storm filled with broken stone.
Taliyah lifted both arms and called the desert up beneath her.