More League cause fuck yeah, Taliyah.
Shurima was hot. Shurima was really hot.
Shurima was on fire.
Vekaura, more accurately, was on fire.
A city built on foundations of history, vast and imposing as no city he had seen in his travels before. Not even Noxus Prime, with impossibly high towers of cold, gray stone that loomed over its citizens like jail-wardens watching over their prisoners. Not even Piltover, which outshined the sun's might in the darkest of nights and in the brightest of days. Nothing he'd ever seen was as impressive as Vekaura, the city of the stones that whispered tales of old.
And it was in ruins. And on fire.
Yasuo was one with the wind as he ran, so fast in his wake that everything was little more than a blur in his vision. His legs were a gust and his breath was the wild winds of a Bilgewater maelstrom.
He hadn't been informed of this, at all, when he asked a gentle enough woman named Shamara for the whereabouts of his little sparrow. He'd expected a more fulfilling answer given that she had had his blade to her throat. He'd have to pay her a visit later, silk traders were awfully easy to find.
He just stepped out of a war to walk right into another one – the man chided himself severely in the depths of his subconscious. But none of that mattered now.
What mattered was that he had to make sure she was okay.
Stone-blocks the size of Ionian palaces littered the streets like corpses felled in battle, casting huge shadows over the cold bodies of men that had, in fact, been felled in battle, by forces he did not want to meddle with. He sped across a few gatherings of survivors that had ventured with great audacity into the open streetways to loot the after-spoils of the carnage for food and tools to defend themselves. They didn't get in his way, and so he didn't get in theirs. They were irrelevant; everything but one thing was irrelevant.
It didn't take him much longer to find trouble. And, coincidentally, her.
It was the rumbling sound, similar to that of an avalanche descending in a furious charge to sweep away the world of men, what made him stop in his tracks, about ten paces away from breaking into what had to be a sort of central plaza. He stopped, because asides from natural disasters, he only knew of one source that could emit such an ominous noise. He blinked and he was no longer about to enter the plaza but just a bit off from its central area, stalking the scenery from behind a boulder of granite. And that's when he saw it.
They were more than twenty, armed with sharp scimitars that shimmered under the incessant sunlight, and wearing garments that left little to no work for his vast imagination to deduce that they were bandits. In the middle of the plaza, surrounded by the evil-doers, was a flock of a few cowering citizens, who seemed to be trying their very best not to soil their weather-worn pants. But they were not dead and robbed yet (yes, in that order), because between them and the bandits someone had cut up an imaginary swath of protection. Which was not really imaginary, as two circular walls of stone had risen to the sides of the girl whose thick eyebrows seemed to grow bigger every day, followed closely behind by her bravery, apparently.
And her beauty, but Yasuo knew it was not the time for those wandering thoughts.
Taliyah looked very different from the girl plagued by a dozen insecurities that had saved him from an avalanche some time ago.
She exuded determination, and who wouldn't with a scowl that vicious?
She had her feet planted firmly in the ground. She owned the ground. She was trying to advise them, to warn them, that the plaza was not their battleground. It was hers.
Yasuo pondered his options.
He could stroll up to her to say hello, cutting through a few scoundrels before they could even turn their little heads at his entrance.
Or.
Yasuo was nothing if not a 'hard-way' sort of teacher. He wasn't about to fight his student's battles when he knew they could handle themselves well enough. To be honest, even the simplest of simpletons that polluted the high-chairs of the Demacian Court could see that his student could handle herself well enough. He scanned his surroundings for a shaded place and he went ahead to rest his back against a fallen column, invoking a fresh breeze to sweep along the asphyxiating dry air around him and admiring the perfect view of the battle that was about to happen.
Taliyah was really tired of dealing with cocky scavengers. She had thought, hoped really, that their last incursion would be their last.
As she had thought of the one before it, and the one before that one. At first she was angry, now she was…tired.
"I am in no mood to kick your sorry excuses for Shuriman asses, gentlemen. I have three encampments to watch over besides this one; I have to bring some medicine to a girl that was stung by a poisonous scorpion; I have to patrol the city-border for more of you and your friends and I haven't slept in two whole days. If you would be so kind as to turn around and leave the city I would be very grateful and I won't chase you down…" she tried her wordier approach first – she always did, and they always laughed.
This time was no exception.
The man with the shiniest ornaments dangling from his neck shouted his retort back at her in shuriman, littering his words with colorful insults that she was not going to translate. It was something along the –predictable enough – lines of "A little girl like you can't do anything against the lot of brawny, big and mean men that we are". Taliyah was just so tired of hearing the same words over and over from each and every scavenging warmonger that had tried to ransack the refugee-encampments in the last days.
But this one added a little more spice to his words, because he brought her age to the board, and frankly that was rude.
At least for most people – for Taliyah it was something a little bit more along the lines of blasphemous. He was not getting on her good side that way.
Tired of indulging their antics, she decided to get it over with. Two blinks was all it took her to jumpstart the action; one to connect with the bedrock under the street and the other to weave it. Two blinks, to open a pit under the men flaking "Mister Sparkleneck" to his left, deep enough to trap them but not quite as deep to make the fall deadly. She tried, mostly, to avoid killing. Scratch that – she always tried to avoid killing. It was the refugees who did most of it, and she wouldn't dare to argue with them that they shouldn't. In Ionia she could argue all she wanted with anyone, but in Shurima things went one of two ways; either you did things the good way or the bad. Words were of no use when it came to the latter.
It took her another two blinks to see the scavenging leader turning with bulging eyes to look at his now-deserted left flank, and only one more, which was a big feat, to incapacitate the warriors to his right, raising stone walls around them in the matter of instants.
This time, four blinks went by before her foe could process what had just happened, and it took her no other blinks at all to see him turning around and running for his life out of the city. She chuckled to herself, because such a sight never got old.
Felling revitalized after such a joyful feeling, she allowed the trapped evil-doers to decide if they wanted to get out of the city by their own free will or pushed by a wall of stone that wasn't guaranteed to not fall down on them. It would have been only one option any other day but she was feeling good for a change.
Naturally, the course of action was clear to them.
She was watching them stroll out in shame behind their leader who-was-probably-going-to-get-stabbed-in-his-sleep when a cold wind swept across the plaza, sending a shiver down her spine and raising some…questions in her mind. It brought a smell quite different from the dryness of the desert to her nose; humid and green, refreshing. It opened her lungs. It was the smell of a forest, which was a ridiculous enough occurrence itself…if it weren't for the fact that, oddly enough, it was not just the smell of any forest and Taliyah's caramel skin paled a little as she realized that. It was the smell of–
The clapping stirred away the cloud of thoughts from her mind, leaving her dazed and confused and newly annoyed. Who in the name of the Great Weaver could be making such a noise in the middle of a broken city?
It was then when she turned towards the sound.
It was then when her stinging response rammed itself right into her closed throat.
Her master was so very pale and out of place next to the denizens of the desert.
Her master was in the desert.
Her master was in the desert and in the same city as her and he was smiling and he had probably seen the fight going down and she was probably blushing–
Her master was in the freaking desert.
Deep breaths.
Yasuo had to admit that he had not expected such an...immediate response. She was standing out there in the open, stiff as a crag, looking at him as if she had seen a ghost. He decided it was probably the right time to approach her.
He walked slowly towards her, agonizingly so, to grant her even more time to process his sudden appearance. But it wasn't enough, apparently. She was still drooling over the sandy ground when he caught up to her. He used her momentary brain-death to ponder once again, not his options but his next words this time. He supposed a simple enough "Hello" would be as effective as anything he could do right then…
But.
…But?
What was he thinking about, again?
Surely, it must have been about the girl who now found herself coiled around his form in a hug that was more like a snake-grab than anything else. It occurred to him, that she had missed his dearly.
Taliyah did not realize how much she missed him until he was right in front of her, flesh and all. She went for the hug before the words.
In Shurima, things went one of two ways.
If you are wondering what chronological, canonical or plot-driven order my stories follow, the answer is yes.