✂
If Lux ever expected to be captured by the Noxians, it would have never been like this.
It would have been during a time of war- or near war. It would have been behind their lines, her first and last mistake. It would have been for her knowledge as a spy. It would have ended with a quick execution.
But when the time comes, it isn’t any of those things.
It’s petty, it’s cruel– she isn’t seized as a mage or as a spy, but as a prize. She isn’t taken during war, or in the battlefield, but from her bed.
And, for the longest time, no one tries to kill her.
She’s more hostage than prisoner. She’s taken days after her engagement is announced and she knows, the moment that she wakes, that it isn’t a coincidence.
When she comes to in a quiet little bedroom, stripped bare but for essentials, all of her belongings have been seized except the gaudy ring around her finger.
It’s a walnut-sized sapphire in an elaborate gold setting. The same color as their banner, and her eyes, and so much of the regal attire her Prince so often favors.
She does not endure imprisonment with grace.
They restrict her from her magic, so she fights the first guard that comes to bring a meal with nails and teeth. Her ring leaves a black and blue dent on the side of his face, but he is armed and she is not. Her rebellion is squashed in seconds.
She wakes with a pounding headache, in a proper cell. No locked-up bedroom, no illusions of civility. The man outside the cell expresses his regrets for how she responded to his hospitality, and she is too unsettled to risk spitting in his face.
She’s seen the marks he left on Jarvan.
Swain has no interest in entertaining her for long and that– that– makes Lux as angry as captivity itself. She is a fearsome mage, a former champion, an infiltrator, a Crownguard– and if she were to be detained, it should have been for one of those details of her character. For information, for power. For her as herself, not as an extension of the Prince.
Her outrage fuels her restlessness until they burn each other out and, in time, it begins to feel as if no one is meant to rescue her.
She tells herself she knew that.
She tells herself that they never negotiated for Jarvan’s own release. For the King’s own only son. And if he hadn’t been important enough—…
She daydreams about a savior anyway. About the Vanguard storming in one day just like they had for him, about being scooped into her brothers arms and coddled like a child. About the apologies they’d bestow on her, about how gently she’d be treated.
She misses everyone.
Weeks pass before she loses track of time and, every time she starts to grow accustomed to imprisonment, Swain visits her again. He speaks to her, a little. Makes mean remarks about her lost love, about her family, about her nation’s reluctance to even bend for her reprieve. He lies about how he would release her for one thing or another, for one territory or some Noxian hostage, but she doesn’t believe him.
And, apparently, neither does her King.
The damned bird is seated on his shoulder every time he comes to visit. If not for that- if not for the blood red eyes and the whisper of magic there- she would have eventually started to turn her back and plug her ears.
(Swain stops frightening her so much when he never reaches to unlock the cage. Perhaps he’d wanted to hurt Jarvan, all those years ago, but her pain doesn’t seem to be of any interest.)
Instead, she finds herself captivated by the raven. She doesn’t know it’s name- doesn’t know if Swain is the type to name his pets- but, whenever its eyes meet hers, the hairs on the back of her neck prick up. That can’t be normal.
While he discusses the futility of rescue, she gazes at the bird. When he regales her with details about her Prince that he shouldn’t know, she gazes at the bird. And eventually, one evening, when he has not shown his face in days, the beast arrives alone, a shadow-like flutter that slips through the bars and perches on the edge of her bed.
She is frightened until a whisper creeps into her head. And she thinks she might be going mad until the crow emits a sound like laughter.
She thinks, and it answers in a cacophony of noise. They go again and again until, eventually, she can discern a crooning, woman’s voice.
She asks.
Beatrice answers.
Her statesmen won’t negotiate for her release. So she decides to take care of it herself.
–
Armored soldiers move her to a different cell, and there is something snide about them now. They travel a long way- or at least, she thinks they must. She doesn’t make the trip completely conscious, and the new prison she wakes up in is built differently, with a rough stone wall on two sides and thick, weathered, iron bars caging her inside.
Lux isn’t sure where they’ve taken her, until a crowd chants DRAVEN overhead.
Two days pass. Or three, or one- she isn’t sure, she can’t sleep. The arena is silent above her for so long, too long, until one day she finally hears a stampede of steps, and chatter. The sound of vendors hawking their wares. Some inbred, vile Noxian selling popcorn to people with the audacity to snack while watching murder.
Louder steps interrupt her reverie and she shrinks back from the bars, tucking limp, tangled strands of hair behind her ears.
The guards come with an extra weapon held between them. The staff is thrown through the bars at her feet, and Lux is so shocked that she doesn’t pick it up, at first.
One of the men barks out an order and there is a key in the cell door and, panicked, terrified, Lux finally scrambles to heft the staff into her hands. The polished wood threatens to slip through her sweaty palms and, feeling her magic still restrained, she lifts it up as if intending to use it as a bat.
The Noxians laugh. It isn’t their fault; it’s probably a very funny sight.
“Save your ‘strength’,” One remarks, nudging the other with his elbow at the joke. Her teeth clench and they move forward in a rush, seizing her arms without the faintest trouble, pinching the sides of her jaw, and upending an elixir down her throat.
She doesn’t feel the effect immediately, as they drag her from the cell. But in minutes, mana prickles at her fingertips like pins and needles, as if every inch of her had been, for so long, numb and is just beginning to jolt awake.
She is shaking when they shove her forward, and she tumbles to her hands and knees onto a dusty bed of sand.
The staff lands at her side and a metal gate clamps shut behind her with a screech.
The crowd is screaming.
She can hardly make out voices in the noise. Too many thousands of things are being shouted all at once, and she doesn’t try to listen. Lux staggers to her feet instead, knuckles white around the staff and gaze swimming haplessly around the shape of the arena.
Swain is there. For one mad moment, she actually thinks thank God.
It isn’t Draven. It could be worse! At least her death will be about her and not some vicious Noxian’s complex.
Swain lifts his staff and she reacts on instinct, diving to the side and letting light cloak her for the first time it has in months. She is invisible for a second, maybe two, but only long enough to realize she’s leaving footprints in the sand.
She spots the talons reaching up for her too late to even move, and they clamp so brutally down around her ankles that she’s anchored to the spot.
She panics, shrinking back from Swain’s approach. She thinks, not yet- not now- please don’t- and throws a weak, unfocused snare that he sidesteps without so much as flinching.
A desperate whimper rises in her throat and she reaches out for Swain instead, so that a soft green tether springs between them from somewhere deep within his chest and strengthens until it becomes a solid bind. Swain is forced to pause in his approach, but the raven on his shoulder chatters delight into her ears as it grows and fuses, morphing with its master’s form to the sound of cracking bones.
It’s just as terrifying as she remembers. The birds surge forward and she throws her arms up in panic, earning pecks and rakes across her skin until she can muster up a proper barrier.
It billows around her like a gust of wind, and a crow or two is thrown into the sand, but it’s not nearly enough to stop the onslaught. The bird- man- thing leans over Lux until she has to huddle to avoid the beaks and claws, bracing her arms over her head and crying in a way that he surely knew she would. In a disgraceful way that means she knows she’s lost.
Until he retreats, inexplicably, and begins to shrink back to a human form.
She feels too scared, too tired, too out of practice to draw on her magic now. She looks up with tear-filled, vibrant eyes, as blue as the ring that now hangs loose around her finger.
”Please,“ The word comes barely as a whisper. The crowd jeers.
Beatrice laughs.
The woman’s voice reaches her ears again, and a jarring tide of mana surges through her body.
Swain’s gaze snaps down to Lux abruptly enough for her to know: he heard it too.
She squeezes her eyes shut, jams the staff into to the ground, and calls light up in a ring beneath his feet.
The heat is intense enough to burn Lux too, but she stumbles back from the melting sand as the bird springs off Swain’s shoulder, taking flight to pause beside her as its master is engulfed in a pillar of white light.
The bright blast dissipates in seconds, leaving its imprint as a circle of clear glass beneath the upright corpse. When the body falls, it shatters.
A hush falls over the arena.
