The announcement of Taliyah managed to do the impossible and make me get back to League fanfiction. There's technically a story I'd like to tell with all this, but we'll see how much I actually write. For now it's a word-vomit celebrating an awesome character such as her. Enjoy!
...
Stay By My Side
...
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.
...
Each pebble carries a poem of its own.
She hasn't really told anyone about that, not even her precious teacher, but wherever she sets her foot, she hears them, feels their vibrations. The stones chime, sing, hum, greet her; hello, hello do you wana hear about the millennia I spent in duet with the river or that time that cute girl with the pigtails picked me up and sent me on an adventure? She smiles and listens to their tiny stories, and marvels at the complexity of the song that becomes after all those tiny voices intertwine, and wonders how they are never off tune.
Before meeting her teacher she was deaf to the songs for a very long time: Noxus might as well have stuffed her ears with cotton and told her to stomp her feet and dig a hole in the playground. She doesn't know how many songs she has ruined that way, and simply hopes she can apologize by changing the song in a way that she can join in after.
She listens and she has learnt the differing songs of places. Sometimes her voice follows along the notes.
Ionian stone crumbles way too easily, sediment and semi-natural layers formed in ancient lakes forming new ones, meeting new friends, seeing age-old ones, caught in a constant flux. In Ionia even the highest mountains can crumble under your feet, as she learns so fast right before meeting her teacher.
It is shapeless and in that utter amorphousness, it can assume any form and function. Like its people, its song is ever changing, and if she lets go, it can swallow her and engulf her in countless, shapeless memories of constant change, and she has to keep herself afloat
Freljordian stone is proud and cold, a triumvirate of deep vibrato reaching for the heavens as though with a single man's wail it can recreate the stars.
It aches for change, as its roots are frozen deeper than imaginable, with something far stronger than solidified water (blood ties always destroy us), stuck in time, more of a vessel than anything else.
The Witch's betrayal has stuck deep in the land itself, piercing it to its very core, leaving a wound that would barely heal. The tribes will be surprised to learn that their differences aren't just skin-deep.
She arrives in Shurima a changed woman.
Her mind insists it is the desert that's different, but it's still endless, hot and very yellow.
A child of the world comes back home, and finds it gone.
But every grain of sand sings to her now, and it's so alien, so new, and so much that she almost loses her footing. This is a dance with too many steps to follow. At first it is so hard to follow, but what choice does she have besides cleaning her ears of excess cotton and forcing her legs to the rhythm.
And at the back of it all, a low timbre echoes everything, more sombre and deep than anything else, rumbling through any nook and cranny of the ever changing dunes and the memory of a thousand dying men's screams. Her intuition somehow pins down the source of that sound as soon as it enters her vision. The giant disk of pure gold hangs low in the sky, eclipsing the sun.
Her face morphs into a snarl and the stone growls around her, as she pushes forward.
This is why she will never accept one emperor to rule over and terrorize her people.
A foolish despot who believes gold is more precious than earth. He may have touched the sky but his stones carry no more songs than hers, or a grain of sand's.
She surfs the golden silken waves, a hunter for a memory etched into the empty horizon.