epivlavis.
The stars above them have only passingly caught the eye of the serpent. A mystery in the darkness beyond that came to her thoughts in the late evening, when the first star stirs itself awake against the half-blackened sky, twinkling in fragments before illuminating. To the west is Mt. Targon - it is there that they believe in celestial beings. Noxus has no time for such beliefs. Her skyward philosophy lasted for a single evening, nursing wine.
Then, the sky opened itself. Men and machine. The harvest. Runeterra was not yet ready - Piltover was but an anomaly, the machines remarked. A flower budding in a growing garden. The machines will not take them. The Bastion, however, will do just nicely.
It is in the audience of an emperor that Cassiopeia allows her form to be revealed - the veils of shadow cannot hold her when there is a woman of black diamond to behold. Noxus has not had an emperor for several hundred years - the Grand General has made room for the galactic presence and her daughters. The word sits strange on her tongue, forked and curling, unfamiliar. Against the sky, the ship stands, visible from the balcony the women have collected themselves upon. The Emperor, her daughters taking watch, and the two women of House DuCouteau. Her sister has taken a momentary leave.
Cassiopeia believes she is speaking to the Hand about their company. Let them politicize among each other. Speak to one another about the concerns of ships and invasions. The stone that Noxus Prime stands upon will last. It is the words spoken between emperor and courtwoman that matter. Secrets are sharper than blades, after all.
‘Galaxy’ is a word the Machines brought. The Targonians call what lays beyond this planet apotero. But galaxy is a much more beautiful word.
“The audience you have gifted us -” she holds a stem glass made of azirite with champagne within. The red crystal colours the drink a dark colour. A similar glass rests next to the emperor, though it is empty, dry. “do you often grant it when arriving planetside?”
Planet is another word she is unfamiliar with. Cassiopeia lounges upon a half-back couch in order to sit at a comfortable height and match her company - her tail stretches away from her company, flicking slightly.
She drinks from her glass.
“It is an honour to be in your presence, nonetheless.”
SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE
The days preceding her arrival were perhaps the most terrifying. The days when the sky over Noxus became black, the days when the sky split open like a massive wound & all the black poured out like blood, like oil, the days when the Void warped & warped in mathematically unspeakable shapes until they exploded like bubbles in a tar pit, voidborn rejoicing in ancient hymns written before the birth of the universe. Those days when the light died & the plague of darkness completely engulfed Noxus Prime. Those dark, dark days that preceded the head-splitting sound & the machines.
Arrival. Harbinger. Emperor. Extinction.
Of all the places in Runeterra, the Emperor chose Noxus. ( Uplifted, first through advanced technology & soon to the stars. Uplifted, chosen to be an instrument of the harvest. ) Technology consumes the capital city, obsidian & humming, architure that scrapes the sky, towers blending with the old walls, the old fortresses. The Immortal Bastian has been transformed into something elegant & sinister, something strange that spreads. Dark things happen deep in the Immortal Bastian. People go down into the darkness & technology & do not return.
Noxus has been blessed by the thing from beyond the stars. The horror from beyond the stars. The horror that ate the stars, devoured them by the hundreds, all consuming, never satisfied, God’s hunger, God’s mouth. Every day, she sits upon the Noxian throne & eats the constellations, one by one.
Today, she sits with one of Noxus’ noble houses. She has watched the DuCouteau women since her arrival, have studied their histories & their geneology & have already determined their future. Several of her daughter accompany her, their strangeness a reflection of their mother who sits in the dark, the only light coming from the glow of the multitudes of red giants in her eyes & the brutal rivers of red carved into her face. A horror of many moving parts that writhe & curl around her feet, that writhe & orchestrate the tides of darkness, the consuming dark, the black water that the voidborn yearn to be immersed in.
Portraits of the DuCouteau ancestors warp, faces glitching, the corruption of reality’s coding dripping from their eyes, their mouths, their ghosts & the legacies becoming memories made of ones & zeroes & numbers that should not exist.
One of her youngest follows the way the serpent-woman’s tail flicks every so often. The first of her daughters to be born in Noxus. Her eyeless face moves as the tail does. She makes a chattering sound, the beginnings of an eldritch dialect embedded in the noise, the cosmic tongue, ancient & mind-shattering even in the smallest of utterances. It is when she tries to grab it that one of her older sisters places her small, pale form into her mother’s lap. In a few hours she will grow into an adult, but in the arms of her mother, that growth slows & she enjoys being small for a little while longer.
❝ Noxus is special, ❞ the Emperor replies, her abyssal voice cold & deep & inhuman; an immortal & cosmic machine producing the words of something eternal & eldritch. ❝ Are you concerned about your future in the world to come? ❞
