The mist clings to his lungs, infecting his too-human body with an otherworldly infestation. The ghost of claws rest heavy on his throat. The haunting stays deep within his bones.
The Black Mist is not a single collective hivemind of thought and instinct - it is a mass of shifting souls, rolling from the split seams of the veil shrouding the Blackened Sea and the islands that exist beyond. It knows where its cold hands have not been, roaming the land with a coveting, searching urge in its cold grasp, tainting the untainted with a mystic corruption.
To those across Valoran, the Black Mist is a Bilgewater sea legend, cursing the sailors who place their trust the ocean and the mysteries it keeps. It does not often crawl over the Empire of Noxus., chokehold presence curling its iron fist over its people. It had been a long time since the Harrowing came to Noxus - to live it is to feel the wind drop cold and to see the coastline grow eerily steady against old docks, still water lapping against pilings.
The sky goes dark, first. Then, the wind picks up.
The capital was split, like a skull over marble's edge. The poor districts beyond the city walls were gutted, slain corpses left on scratched wood - unwanted by the vicious slaughter, their souls harvested whilst their bodies were left to rot. Bodies are not needed, they say - so the corpses are mangled and torn by spectral weapons, and are left in streets and homes. Noxus is built upon mountains that never were, and the walls that divide the city from its poorer districts kept the legions at bay.
The skies remember how the mist stained the city black. The following days came raw and abraded, like the waking period after deep dreaming. To see Noxus, in all its of glory in death and pride found in bloodshed, take pause after a massacre of its own people - it briefly, fleetingly, amused Vladimir. But only fleeting.
He was among the living left standing. The taste of death lingered in his mouth. His veins felt empty, a haunting air drying him of blood, essence, and life. Haunted.
His body felt hollow, like his skin had been cut and nothing bled from within, coursing down his arms and limbs in thick rivers of red. His blood grew thin and chilled his bones - the absence of warmth had never bothered him until the mist had loosened its hold over him and dragged itself away, across the continent and back to the blackened islands it came from.
He does not dream often when sleep manages to find him, when the night is no longer restless and his thoughts recede for one evening. But now he dreams of long bones for fingers, skeletal palms over his wrists and throat, roaming his body and holding him. Searching for where his life beats within him the loudest. Searching for where it may draw him out. It's never cruel, and it's never violent - roaming and searching, a careful touch, a slow caress.
Documentations regarding the Harrowing and the lands from whence it came are rare to find - there are old texts, though often they are untranslated, as well as belonging to nobility he has chosen to separate himself from, - those nobles of Noxus keep them for novelty reasons, something to brag about, something to fill their libraries and vaults with. He doesn't like the people Emilie LeBlanc introduces him to. They pry, more than nobility with their own secrets to hide should. But they can't ask about the blood under his nails if they can't see it.
There's a song sung in the back of his mind, something like a melody he wants to memorize, hymnals that have the right kind of wrong threat woven into their fogshrouded promise. It caught him and curled itself into the back of his thoughts, heard in the rumbling horde of the Harrowing.
"Do you hear singing, Emilie?"
Emilie LeBlanc offered him a glance, curiosity cut clear over her sharp features, until her interest waned. She always responded to her true name when it came from him - the matron's title she had bestowed upon her however many years ago need not to be spoken. "The Kindred cult are in the streets. Do you mean them?"
While there is singing among the followers of Kindred - who walk winding streets as dusk settles over Noxus and sing for those lost, cleansing the streets of the lingering haunt of the Harrowing - the song he hears is more chilling, more slicing . Gouges in the skin that don't bleed the way they must.
"No. Something else. It's far away."
"Then I don't know. You're imagining things, Vlad."
Of course she wouldn't understand.
( my song is not for her. it is ours. )
The Kindred choir songs are meant to finalize death, close the eyes of the lost and carry their spirits away. Vladimir wonders why they do not revel in the captivating mysticism of the undead, life beyond life.
He never expected to witness a Harrowing. Either he'd hear of its effects on a neighbouring state - from outlying city states and factions not yet assimilated by the heavy boot of Noxus, to their neighboured kingdom Demacia - or have it kill him before he can breathe its rotten air, tearing his soul from his body like a dissection, swallowing him whole and taking millennia of blood magic knowledge with it. It was abrupt and sudden, as death often comes.
Vladimir feels a great weight in his bones, exhaustion that feels heavier than the insomnia he is well acquainted with.
"Maybe you're traumatized," the General's daughter offers one day, clicking her tongue like the scrape of her heel on stone, a blade tucked alongside her wrist - cutting the skin, bloodletting an insult. "Scared because you could've died."
"Probably." He's very curt with the people he's meant to charm. Emilie has told him he blunders through conversations quite often for a man who carries himself the way he does.
"That isn't very Noxian of you, is it?"
He slouches against the stone, looking over the aggregating buildings of Noxus, the fortress' walls serving as an imposing divider between the recovering city and the untouched beacon of Noxian integrity. A chill ran through the Bastion, passing through them both like they were stripped of their flesh with exposed flayed bone - curling wisps of wind dancing against exposed marrow.
When it waned, it felt like the fleeting touch of a lover.
He has a single book open, split at the spine over a desk. There is so little to learn. Most accounts of harrowed lands and roaming spectres are tall tales from the shores of Bilgewater, passed along countless tongues and across waters like stones on a lake - finding their home on an empty sheet of paper. Vladimir questions how many sea tales have their merit anymore, if they ever did at all.
He finds a story of a warlord, a once feared tyrant of a land before Noxus, but he doesn't consider it useful.
Sleep won't take him. He thinks he's going to die.
It is -
( beautiful. consuming. intoxicating. to feel the caress of death for the first time - )
comforting.
He does not seek council with the High Priestess often.
Elise circles the parlour, her personal finery untouched from the invasion. The walls are tall, silkscreen drapes over wide windows shrouding the ugly Noxian sun. She had acknowledged his entry with a full smile and outstretched arms - when he sat himself without a word, she continued her movements, rigid and held together. She's anxious as well, but he won't acknowledge it, for her sake. It's unbecoming of her.
"All of Runeterra is susceptible to the Harrowing," she states to him in a passing breath when her gaze is swept outside an open window, the low breeze harbouring a cold memory casting itself inside. "But I never expected it to come to Noxus."
"Not while you are in its service?" Vladimir suggests, head lowered, dark eyes on the steel that plates his fingers. Pretending to play Noxus' courtly games is so tiring. He is so tired. He wants to sleep.
"Its influence has reached Noxus already." Vladimir does not look at her, but he knows her gaze is on him. "It is not widespread. But it has taken root. Has something angered them? Drawn the attention of the Isles?"
The wind that rolls through the salon grazes his skin with a draining touch, the lingering dread of a stretched horizon etching itself into Vladimir's bones. Death lingers in the air, from the rising filth in the almshouses turned crematoriums for the countless dead in the capital, to the presence of spirits hanging in the very parlour Noxus' elite meet in. The memorabilia and religious fixtures Elise had carved from Vilemani skulls seem to rattle and hum with an elegy of the Shadow Isles, carried upon the wind.
He can hear her steps on the marble. She stands to his left, arms curved and crossed over her chest. It is now that Vladimir offers his cold eyes, hollow and bone white with dark rings under swollen lids. His tone is steady and his body stiff. Peaceful sleep has not reached him in years, and he will not show wear of such effect now.
"Maybe they're questioning you," Vladimir suggests, tersely. Elise's stare is cold, and so is his. She speaks slowly, deliberately.
"If She wants to question my capability, I can assure you that I would not be standing here." Elise's tone carries the haunting echo of a woman who knows what she risks. The price she has put on her life is tremendously high.
He respects very few people. A person who knows her death is so easy to reach yet stares it in its eight eyes is one of them.
Between them is a glass table, low to the ground and framed in brass. Elise sits herself across from him, long legs crossed over another, and watches him carefully. Her eyes feel heavy over him, a weighted gaze that looks to split him apart and find his purpose. Skin from bone. He knows that trick too well.
"Has it taken its toll on you?" She asks, watching him through her lashes.
Vladimir looks at the skull behind her. "There's a song."
"Have you been sleeping recently, Vladimir?" Emilie asks. For a moment, he wants to tell her he doesn't sleep - apparitions of the Shadow Isles haven't change this.
He keeps his eyes down, on the silver curled around the tips of his fingers. Emilie clicks her tongue, and leans farther back in her seat, one leg over another. She knows him, and he knows her - as well as she'd ever allow someone to know her, anyway - and because of this, she lets the edge settle back into her voice, and her curt tongue is sharper. "You'll terrify everyone if you let yourself walk around like that. You look dead."
Vladimir still doesn't respond. Emilie drops her hands into her lap. "Vladimir."
"Yes?"
"Pay attention to what I'm saying."
"I can hear you fine," he says, lifting his head and staring at her. His eyes feel heavy and his gaze isn't steady but this isn't new , he's never slept well and he spends many of his nights restless and awake - the exhaustion that has taken over him that is worse than any insomniac episode is what pulls on him, drags his body to the earth and tries to bury him beneath it.
"I want to see it."
"See what?"
"The Isles."
She doesn't show the way her thoughts pause and her curiosity piques, or the way her heart beats twice and the light in her eyes is interest over concern. The game Noxian nobility plays is an interesting one - all who participate know that no word spoken is genuine, yet speak to one another with the same heartfelt concern as any other.
"Why? What purpose do you have there?" There is no back support of the seat she's taken. Elise leans herself back anyway, away from Vladimir, to watch him.
Vladimir responds by leaning forward, hands curling to loose fists and resting his chin on his flat fingers. He thinks of the empty wind through his windows. He thinks of the way death washed itself over him. He thinks of a song that he has never heard before but can't get out of his head.
"It's calling to me." He wonders what the shoreline will look like. "When you went, did you have any reason beyond an insatiable curiosity?"
Her silence is consuming, and he knows there's something she won't say. Elise turns over the request in her head like she'd turn a stone in her palm. Nothing subtle, nothing hidden in code or court talk, nothing she can't understand. He lies about many things - who he is, where he came from, who he's killed - but his intentions are always clear, like the hour after a morning fog. "I only deliver disciples to Her lair. Are you asking to be converted, or are you asking me to deliver you to your burial?"
He smiles. She thinks he wants her God. "I only ask you guide me."
If she knows he's lying, she's better at hiding it than he is. "I will organize a pilgrimage."
The air shifts when he breathes in for the first time. The ocean salt fades - familiar and tepid, like the roll of water - and Vladimir can taste death in the air.
The stale rot in the sickly warm air roots itself among the coven of hooded acolytes, rolling dread cast over the shoreline the same way the fog does. Elise carries herself with a determined clarity, too comfortable in the way the wind rolls over her shoulders and the howling silence consumes the island. She is in long dark robes, ceremonial in purpose - dark regalia laced and lined with spider silk hemwork, etching where the cuffs drape down her forearms and curl in the crook of her arms.
He wears a hood to match the mass of acolytes at her heels. The unsteady caution of the isles roll up behind him - skeletal hands that curl like the wisps of fog around his ankles seem to hang over him. He's urged along.
He's welcomed inside. He's awaited.
Vladimir looks to Elise, who smiles to herself as means of routine - the island knows her, and it allows her to walk easy through the mist, bowing to her presence by dissipating. He wonders how it will speak to him. He, too, is willing, as she was, however long ago.
His heels sink into the dirt, damp from a receding tide. Elise turns her head, glancing down at Vladimir, and waits to see his apprehension. She finds none. He knows she's watching.
"The temple is within the forest ahead," she states, spoken to those who draw their attention to their unsettling surroundings, and also unto Vladimir - he knows what lies within the temple she details. He offers her a look, one that turns her lies over in its hand, considering. She smiles at him, threatening. Do not jeopardize this. You are not my priority.
Death rolls around them as they embark within the beaten paths of the island, paths framed by flora that hangs between consuming life and peaceful death. The sky is dark, a low moon shrouded by clouds that seem to curl, domed over the mass and its priestess - closing in, winding them tight, crushed between the star-barren sky and the cold, lifeless earth. Flowers that bloom with dried petals hang at their feet. The taste of rot reaches their throats. Vladimir breathes in, and Elise knows that reaction too well.
He steps on something that cracks. Fallen oak branch, or forgotten bone - it's a sound that resonates an eerie serenity within him. He considers, for a passing moment, he should not find peace.
The song keeps singing to him. It's louder here. But it does not come from a spider's web.
It is then, that Vladimir also considers he is not here to submit himself to the altar of Elise's sacrifices. It is not in him to stop her, use the knowledge earnt through secondhand gossip passed among the elite of the Black Rose to halt her pilgrimage and spare the lives of her congregation. Even if he cared, found it in him to consider the lives of humans deserving of whatever self-sacrificing mercy he could possibly find within him, they'd die at the hands of the island anyway.
It's buried into his skull. Death that sounds like a melody. Luring and lulling and pulling him along. Like hands at his sleeves, only nobody is there, clawing at his wrist and taking him where he never feared and only wondered. Death has intrigued him, kept him wondering, but never wanting, never longing. Its new hold on him is exhilarating.
She knows he steps away when the footsteps over familiar dry earth lose their even rhythm, a pause in the congregation behind her. Elise turns herself around and searches for the dissent, and grits fanged canines when her most interesting catch is gone . One of the women she had brought steps to her left side, passing a glance upward.
"Should we search for him, Your Reverence?" it comes low, and pulls her from her consuming thoughts of budding rage. Elise's eyes find the ones of her attentive disciple, looking through the fear she tries to bury beneath her skin. The island is cold, and the fog passes through her bones, no matter how she swallows down the anxiety swelling inside her.
Her gaze is sharp. "No." Elise steps further into the shadows. "The island will claim him soon enough. If it doesn't, I will find him myself."
He is filled with the exhilarating feeling of getting away with something he shouldn't be doing. Every step into the eternal darkness that hangs over the isles, foot over blackened earth, fills him with invigorated excitement. Vladimir does not know where he is running. He hears the sighs of spirits, echoing through the trees and calling for names he cannot recognize, long forgotten by the waning memory of time.
Some sound like his name, but he reasons it's the delirium reaching him, mesmerized by the holy ground he has found, anticipating it awaits his arrival.
He's breathing deeply, sharply inhaling and exhaling heavily, looking across a horizon that closes in to find the meaning of why he chose to come. Vladimir realizes he hasn't a single idea what he is meant to do with the death he breathes in, lightheaded on the rot clinging to his lungs and throat. His arms are stiff at his side.
There's a fog over the islands, not unlike that which had ravaged Noxus, hanging heavy and shrouding the horizon and the lands long beyond it - the water that rolls against the shorelines pull mist from over the ocean, pulling it around him, trapping him with cold air flooding his lungs. There is a wind, and it blows low, close to the ground, passing through the fabric of his clothes. Shapes move within the fog, and the spirits take notice of him.
He's never been much of a person, but unfortunately, he is alive. Life brought to the Shadow Isles calls upon the attention of the dead.
With a low roll of wind, he comes - a wraith that follows the curling mist, long limbs that hang without use above the rotting earth, eyes alight with the cold glow of a haunted harbour - Vladimir sees no iris nor pupil, nothing within the armoured priest but icy decay. He is unsure if something wills him to stay, or if fear, once thought dead, only dormant, roots itself inside his bones. The spirit narrows its glowing eyes, and watches Vladimir.
Clutched in one hand is a staff. Ceremonial. It resembles nothing of what the spider priestess shares with her coven. He considers running, but the wraith's free hand is at his throat.
The skeletal hand gripping the frame of his jaw feels like a cold knife, lingering presence of hanging, long dead flesh over the curves of each finger with sharp clawed talons for nails. The wraith has no need to breathe yet exhales vulgar death over Vladimir, eyes void of human spark and lifelingering meaning, leaning in to stare into the white irises of his painfully (unwillingly) human shell. He's being watched with an interest that is as cold as the northern snow.
It's instinctive to bring a hand up to the hand clutching him. His own wraps around a thin wrist, and only feels the curve of bone beneath it, wrapped in tattered red cloth. He doesn't push. The spirit pushes his nails into Vladimir's flesh regardless.
His voice is cold water underneath winter's ice, lingering on vowels and dragging them through the space between his rotten teeth. It sounds like a voice that didn't die with the rest of its host. "Why are you here?"
The grip doesn't, can't tighten. Vladimir knows this. But the tension in the bone feels as if his hand longs to. "I fled a coven, dedicated to one of the spirits on these islands-"
In all of his life, Vladimir is thankful his voice can remain clear when he is lying. He can't look away from the miraculous sea-green of the priest's eyes. He fears if he does, he may perish.
"I was drawn here." The words feel strange around his tongue. He never believed in the common faiths of Noxus - he never found comfort in their words. He doesn't consider himself faithful now. Following the desires of death doesn't accredit to any newfound piety. "You've been - singing to me."
Death's grip recedes from him. When his talons pull away, they leave pressed lines where they gripped Vladimir's skin, a cold touch that is not replaced with warmth. The haunting within Vladimir keeps him still, rooted in the grasp of perfect death. The sea-green is captivating.
There's a slow blink that covers those eyes boring into the bones of Vladimir's face. The wind howls, and the spirits that hang off him sigh. His feet won't touch the ground, and he continues to stare at Vladimir, whose legs feel rooted, held down by decaying life. He seems to be considering something.
"So - it called upon you," he finally says. "The Song lingered, and you followed it."
Vladimir nods.
"It has been a long time since the living came to meet the dead." He speaks, recalling a memory. "For most, your presence is unexpected. Yet…"
He seems to lean leftward, against the sceptre he now holds in both hands. "The power of a blood mage - is that what you attempted to do, moments before?"
Vladimir nods. His voice is like a song through a glass hallway - loud and echoing and hollow, a voice of a thousand different lives culled and wound into one. It is captivating. And beautiful. And terrifying.
Those eyes, filled with an unholy light, seem to glow with anticipation. "It was I who left the Song when I departed your land."
"Who are you?" a deathsinger was in the old writings he found, but the already little information had even less on this one-
"I am Karthus," he says, with a smile less sinister, more sharp, with an unknown threat that has Vladimir captivated. "and I have been awaiting you, Noxian."
His heartbeat lulls, stilling in his chest - his blood turns to ice when Karthus' voice rolls through him, a choir wound together in one haunting breath. The voice is familiar in the way the night sky is - ever present, hung over his head with reminders and omens stretched across, holding him hostage in the land of death. It sounds like a threat, something to scare him - and he's never trusted anyone, and he still doesn't, but maybe there is a way to sate the Song in his head.
"So you have," he tries, flippant and empty, trying to keep as wary of a gaze he can.
"The power present in your nation's capital could only belong to one person," Karthus responds, smile as simple as if this is how it was meant to end. "I longed to meet them."
"You could sense me."
"Certainly, this capability of mine is not surprising. In years past, I have known men wirh powers such as yours - to show an interest in the sole practitioner of such potent magic is a rational desire."
He is less hackled, posture once more impeccable and hand raised to his own face. He is familiar, but not in manners that Vladimir could name him at any other time - it is the way he is clothed, the insignia across his pauldrons and affixed on his hat. This isn't much different from the robes worn by priests of the Kindred - he recognizes them from Noxus.
"You came once you heard my Song," Karthus speaks again, with a knowing note to his choir of voices, a smile he would not believe residence of these Isles to posses. "You are with the coven that passes this island."
"You know about them," Vladimir says, and thinks on the fury that must burn through Elise. She can kill another noble, if that's what she wants. He doesn't care, but won't give her the satisfaction either way.
"Their purpose is not a secret here."
"Their priestess might come looking for me once she's killed them all. But I don't think she will curry favour with anyone here if she kills your guest."
Karthus' laughter is soft, wisps of souls once were curling around air that never was. It has a melody to it Vladimir wants to follow.
"Perhaps I may prevent her from harming you with my purpose of calling you here."
Vladimir looks at him, directly. The wasting skin, the bones of his face rounded - he has never thought to stare at a lich. "And what is that?"
Karthus touches his throat.
"Join me."
Her mind drifts and her thoughts are distant when she pulls herself from her union, venom of the Vilemaw rolling down her curled fingers and over her cupped palm. The hall of the temple is silent once more, with no bones being cracked or silk being pulled, and no whispers of her disciples, and no final sobs of life. She stands as the final woman above corpses, the offered vials presented to her by the beautiful immortal Goddess she covets life for lined up on an altar bed. Elise does not enjoy this particular offering.
The vials are placed in a rucksack her last standing apprentice once held. Leather bound and older than the girl who carried it - Elise remembers countless girls before her, and there will be more girls that can replace her. All she can hear is her own breathing.
She does not speak to the wraiths, spirits and spectres here. She has no need to. She is certain they are aware of her, and she is certain her favour with the arachnid buried deep within the islands is what protects her from whatever wrath or curiosity would lead them to her. She never stays for longer than she must. She never searches, never travels farther than the temple.
Her gown is still perfect, silken robes rolling in the cold and gentle breeze that greets her when she steps from the temple's once sealed doors. Those bodies will keep Her sated for many months to come - wrapped in the webs She has weaved, cocooned in silk. Elise keeps her gaze ahead, steady, narrowed. The wayward spirits that linger in the air like lost whispers croon around her, speaking to themselves in sighs. She is always fulfilled when she leaves, feeling the imperfections of her skin wane and her vision become sharper. She feels alive among the dead.
Vladimir is still at the forefront of her thoughts. She admits this is the most thought she's ever given about his wellbeing, and saying it like that is far too generous. She knows he has chosen to bury himself within the Isles - he wouldn't be stupid enough to try to escape on the boat they arrived on without her.
Petty, yes.
But not stupid.
He knows he can't get anywhere.
She can hear the rolling waves against an old dock distantly, water no longer following in a lazy river - and in between the whispering spirits and the dark, murky waters, she can hear something else.
"If you're going to kill me, you should be quick about it," she calls into the aether, her long legs coming to a halt. "I do not have time for your dramatics, Vladimir. I am awaited back home."
The silence remains. She pauses, and then continues walking, head high and without visible care for his antics.
"Are you angry that I tried to kill you?" she asks to nothing. "I would apologise, but you should have seen it coming, my dear. At least we have a story to tell. Walk with me, we will return-"
She stops when he appears. Immediately, it seems to be that he appears from nowhere - but her eyes are sharp, after all, and caught the mist sweeping upward from the earth below them, like the trail of fog around her was Vladimir himself. Elise stares and shock strikes her, looking between his lurid and sickly skin and the desecration of the hooded garment she had given him for their pilgrimage. His hands are not particularly human.
Her shock quickly turns to fury.
"Where did you-"
"I didn't come here for you, don't give yourself so much credit." It's still him, with that agonizingly dry voice and the nasally drawl to every vowel - even with the airy tone that echoes his taunt. "You were only my method of travel."
"Who did this to you?" it's an appalled command more than it is concern, with Elise gritting her fanged teeth in slow boiling rage. "I know who resides here, Vladimir, and I know what they are capable of, as well as how they take lives-"
"He didn't say." He's lying. He's infuriating. "He offered I join his Choir. I enjoyed the idea of necromancy. This is more than what Emilie was trying to encourage in my meditations."
An eerie realization dawns upon Elise's face, and the way her eyes widen tells Vladimir just that. She does not darken, only stiffens her resolve. She frowns, and walks towards him, past him.
"Am I going to leave you here, or are you going to figure out how you will explain this to Emilie's council as we return?"
He's quiet. At first, she believes he did not follow, and remained where they stood before. Then she wonders if it was an apparition, the isles toying with her mind as she leaves, prying into her personal concerns and pulling her suspicions forward. But then he speaks, and it sounds as if he is right behind her. Elise doesn't turn around.
"I'm staying."
Elise's fists clench. It was stupid to bring him here.
"That Lich is terrible company, I hope you know."
She turns her head. He stares at her, empty white eyes over wan flesh, the beginning of decay around his eyes where shadows and bruises were but hours ago. His jaw appears set, gritting his teeth that he's lost his edge over her. Her own smile is insidious.
"I know everything about this place. You don't know what you're getting into."
The wind catches her gown. He hears the distant lap of the ocean.