THE HAUNTED INN is a piece of League of Legends Fan Fiction written by Cavebear, in May-June 2014. League of Legends is the property of Riot Games.
THE HAUNTED INN
Foreword
This story started as an exercise, but ended up as a novella. Three League of Legends friends each suggested two champions, one male and one female, to use as characters. My task was to create a working story around them and their interactions. The couples and their intended genres are as follows:
1) Ryze & Annie, mystery/horror
2) Ashe & Taric, light romance
3) Draven & Jinx, comedy
The story is set perhaps 3-5 years before the characters join the League.
For reading convenience, the files are blocked into groups of four chapters each, with an average word count per file of 2500-3000 words.
This novella is intended for League of Legends players of all ages. There is no hard profanity or explicit sexual content. There is some violence. Please enjoy.
[0] South Acorn, Middle of Nowhere—Prologue
Sometimes the most exceptional events transpire at the most mundane of places. Sometimes even the most unusual of characters get drawn into the same types of clichéd melodrama as the common man.
It was a chilly, grey, and windy day, the kind that rarely blows any good. In that backward armpit border march of Demacia called Gorfia, with the weather smelling very much like rain, travellers hastened to find shelter, lest they receive a cold soaking. In the case of the crossroad village of South Acorn, the most hospitable place for a weary traveller to find rest was the aging and rustic but still somewhat decadent Old Glory Inn.
Old Glory had once been a hunting lodge for a long-dead margrave by the name of William, known as William the Good, and its spacious rooms and halls were designed to accommodate a fair-sized war party. The main hall and the suite formerly for the use of the margrave were traditionally left empty, on account of the lack of custom from the merchants and travellers passing through the region, who usually opted to stay in Gorfia Town itself. Also, these rooms were haunted.
The servants' hall, however, was a popular watering hole frequented by the numerous local hunters and the occasional Demacian Ranger, and boasted a rough-and-ready clientèle. Arm-wrestling, knife-throwing, and tall-tale-telling were the three most popular pastimes of the regulars, if one does not include time-wasting as a legitimate way to pass the time.
One unusual feature of Old Glory was the large iron cage that hung from a thick branch of an ancient oak within bowshot of the inn's front gate. The travellers hurrying toward the inn paid no attention to the well-dressed old skeleton in the cage. They would after all have the rest of the afternoon to listen to tedious accounts of the local history, once inside and sheltered from the impending storm.