Unconsciousness only just beginning to leave him, the first thing Warwick could discern from reality and his dreamless slumber was a heavenly warmth that overcame every nerve in his body. It was a warmth that settled over him like a wonderful fleece draped over his hide. Comforting him in a manner longer and greater than he could ever hope to remember. His tongue rolled about within his closed, saliva-rich mouth, moving over his fangs and across the interior of his black lips.
He could detect something else. It was a sound. A voice. A song; a beautiful, beautiful song hung around his ears, filling his half-conscious mind with its grace. Filling it with images. Images of the past. Memories.
Memories.
Warwick knew all too well of the only memories his mind was able to keep after his transformation. Fear and hatred took hold of his body at the idea of remembering those forsaken times. He wanted to forget them all. He wanted to forget his time spent on the operating table. Being carved and cut into, the metal augmentations that replaced many of his bones, being injected with every alchemical ingredient meant to cause pain and acting as nothing more than a guinea pig for that damned mad chemist who made him into this. At last, the images he so greatly loathed to reimagine faded before he could truly experience them.
The song, however, seemed to notice his growing tension. It grew in volume, replacing his anxiety. The hum of that angelic voice soothed every muscle in the chimera's mutated form. A moan left his mouth as he felt himself relax, the last of his worry leaving him like a departing storm.
His eyes opened at last, and a faint ray of sunlight was the first sight to greet them. Getting used to the gleam, he realized that there was a shape looming over him, cloaked in a dress of sorts. It looked female. It looked human. Her skin, pallid as snow, was highlighted in marks imprinted upon her that resembled curling celestial symbols. Smooth, raven-black hair fell finely from her head, and Warwick eventually came to the realization that one of her hands was stroking at the fur on the side of his neck in a tender motion. It accompanied the song that emerged from her lips in a fluent motion, matching it splendor in every fathomable way.
And her eyes... her eyes were something else entirely. Something inhuman; golden and beguiling. Half-open, they stared down at him, into his own. Compared to the rest of what he saw in her so far, they looked like a pair of glittering stars in a sky of infinite void and blackness. He found himself getting blissfully lost in them as she ran her wandering hand over his forehead until it ventured behind both of his ears, getting at the perfect spot where a scar lay which he often spent many an hour itching at. With her gentle touch, any ailment he possessed, major or minor, seemed to... vanish.
For a time, Warwick simply stared into her calm, otherworldly eyes and at the impossibly warm smile she possessed. He didn't know how to react to this sort of situation in the slightest. Was it fear that clenched at his mind as he gazed upon this unperturbed being? Anger? No... the alien feeling of all his negative emotions having left him was far, far too clear to ignore. Was it... pleasure? No, it couldn't have been that either. Were he to have ever felt something like that ever again without it being given during or after a rush of blood and violence, the unnatural chimera probably would have just sprung up onto his feet, unleashed a bellowing roar at her and then flee the scene. And yet, with the vexingly delightful sensation of her hand stroking the fur around his face and snout as the other cradled his head upon her lap... he felt heavily inclined to resist the action. And for a time he did.
After what seemed like an eternity of vacuous ecstasy, the strange individual who cared for Warwick so ungrudgingly stopped singing and instead spoke. "Those wounds you possessed were fairly gruesome to observe. I managed to mend them with my power, so you should feel as good as new now," she whispered in a tone as soft as down, and one that felt to Warwick like a wonderful, rare beam of sunlight falling upon his body on a cold day in Zaun's smog-infested streets. Still paralyzed by his conflicted mind, all he could do was emit a long and high pitched whine that ended in a sigh.
"How curious it is for someone like you to visit my grove, really," she came again. "You resemble a creature with great intelligence, but I do not know that for sure. I wonder, can you speak?"
"Sp-sp-speak?" Warwick found himself having to form enough willpower just to talk. His voice itself was low and guttural to the point that it sounded more like an animalistic growl, but still the being above him remained unmolested. "I... I can speak."
"So you can," she chuckled, the laugh itself mirthful and filled with nothing but happiness. Its insidious effects were like the enthralling song from before; it forced out a sense of gratification that burned within Warwick's chemical-infused blood to match the excruciating level of agony granted by fiery pitch. "How very interesting this is. And how very fortunate for you to have stumbled into my domain. You looked minutes away from meeting the Eternal Hunters, given those injuries you possessed. You were out of it for a day and a night."
However dulled his senses were, Warwick noticed at last that his physical pain was truly gone. It was either his biology's doing, or this being's mentioned magic that had done it. Either way, Warwick also noticed that for this he cared not. This place was not his own. He knew, for all the treatment he had received, that he had to leave. Of course, such an action had to start with him sitting up and getting a better grip on things.
When he finally gained the fortitude to perform the deed upon sucking in a deep breath of the fresh air around him, he did so, albeit sluggishly. He shut his eyes, clenching their lids together tightly against the sting of the dry rheum that had gathered between them while he slept. Grunting, he rolled himself off of her lap and landed upon his rump, inhaling a deep breath while his tail swished about where it extended behind him with new life.
The winsome healer slowly rose to her feet to join him, her shape still quite small compared to the creature simply sitting before her. "My name is Soraka. Who, or what, are you, if I may ask?" Her voice was innocently curious, and Warwick heard the question well enough. She went on, "Though I have a theory, I have never seen any creature with quite a resemblance to you before."
Warwick was quiet for a moment, as though thinking deeply on this query. "I... am a monster," he eventually growled. His eyes traveled down to the metal claws sticking from the flesh of his fingers on his right arm, and he stared at them long and hard; knowing just how far the metal within the bone there went. Knowing of the tortuous pain it constantly gave off that he had to get used to, after repeated attempts to violently rip the metal from his augmented limb manually proved futile. "That is what you should know me as. That is all I am. That was what I was created to be. And that is what I will die as."
Soraka's brow lowered skeptically, an easy smile snaking upon her lips. "Nobody is born a monster. Surely you were not." The bottom of her staff dug around in the soil below it as she twisted it around in her grasp. "Who were you before you so rashly declared yourself as such a twisted thing? A warrior? An artist? Surely you were not always what you claim to be..."
"Do not presume for a second that you even think you know who I was. I have no reason to tell you a single thing," he argued, snapping the words at her. "What I am now is a beast that stalks a place far from here. My prey is the corrupt and the vile. And I hunt them. That's all that matters to me."
"You only hunt those you see as cruel and foul?" Soraka inquired once more. "So, you see yourself as a being of vengeance, then?"
"One could... say that I am," he agreed, uneasy as it was with the character who had, thus far, refused to give off even a hint of intimidation by how he looked and sounded. He turned his shoulder to her, his left ear twitching twice in annoyance at her prying antics. "As I said, I am not from here. I live in a place ruled by scum. I am the only force there that... cares enough to do anything about it. To bring... justice to those who deserve it."
"Your 'justice' is to hunt them? Slaughter them?" Soraka's fingers wrapped a little tighter around her staff, a note of slight disturbance clinging to her words.
"It is better for the likes of them to bear the brunt of my savagery more than anyone else," Warwick responded, his hazy memory going back to the kills he committed in the not so distant past. "The only people I ever want to kill are them. I won't hurt the ones who have done nothing wrong, if I can help it. I lose myself the moment I smell the blood of the guilty. It's like... something gnawing at my brain, telling me to tear apart everything around me. Sometimes... sometimes I go into a frenzy."
Soraka processed all this with a hum, still seeing no reason to despise him. She tried to place her hand upon the chimera's shoulder in a friendly gesture, but he quickly pulled it away from her. Quietly sighing, she only looked his way with deep thoughts circulating in her mind until she released them.
"Even before you told me this, I knew you are not native to this place. Though your outward appearance is uncanny to theirs, I know you are not a member of the vastaya," she decided to speak next, making mention of the secretive people living in of Ionia whose ancestral ties left them with a mixture of animalistic features. "The truth is... that you were a man once, weren't you?" The second Warwick heard this question, his face snapped to his healer in a vicious glare and he snarled aloud. This instantly told Soraka that she was correct in her assumption, otherwise he might not have given off as upset of a visage as this.
His claws anxiously curling into his palms until they dug into the soft flesh there, the chimera stormed up to the Starchild with quick and purposeful steps while she in turn simply stood there unflinchingly. He stared down at her, teeth bared, a growl reverberating from within his throat and a look of red-eyed murder adorning his expression. In turn, she calmly looked up to him with no fear on hers. It was when Warwick's wrathful visage started to fade back into what it was before when he spoke once more. "I was a man. A man who did wretched things. A man who could never run from the sins he committed when he tried. And after that man became who I am, I killed him first!"
The sound of the roar he used to end his sentence was loud enough to startle several birds sitting in the tops of the green trees surrounding them from within the grove, and their little, colorful forms tweeted in panic as they fled from the area. Soraka watched them fly off with a lowered brow, keeping her composure and waited patiently for silence to return before speaking again. Warwick's heavy breathing was the only sound going out now, but it, too, soon halted.
"I will let you leave, if that is what you wish. Should you ever find yourself in Ionia again, hurt or otherwise, I will be here," she said to him. "I truly hope our pathways cross again. I would like to get to know a person like you more. I honestly do."
Warwick would have none of her blandishments. "Bah!" he could not help but puff, waving an uncaring claw her way from behind his back. "I'm not so much a person as I am an animal. Save your honeyed breath for another passerby who gives a damn for it..."
His tail flicking as he moved away from her the final time, Warwick began to depart. Quickly falling onto all fours and breaking into a bounding pace, he abandoned the grove and the strange, kind being who resided within it. Soraka watched him leave, unworried by his harsh words. As a matter of fact, that smile on her face seemed even more radiant than before. Knowing he was gone, and with the birds returning to their places in the trees they were once scared from, she began to return to the denser folds of her sacred territory. But as she left, a peculiar, hopeful thought tickled her brain.
Somehow, a part of her knew he would return. Somehow, that odd creature would come and visit her grove once again; his reasons for inevitably doing so unknown to the Starchild, but the truth all to clear to her. Somehow he would come back to her, and murmuring a chuckle to herself, she could hardly wait for it.
Somehow...
Upon arriving to the sand-laden beach and the glimmering blue ocean he once emerged from, Warwick took a final look at the land he traversed through. On his way back here he paid the Ionia's features some mind, but only just barely more than before. He thought to them for a few seconds, admiring them as well as he possibly could, and then entered the briny waters before him. With great and reinvigorated strokes, he began swimming. It took as long to traverse as when he crossed it in search for his prey, perhaps even longer due to lacking a quarry to pursue. Either way, the time it took to cross the sea paid off for him, for eventually, after a day and a night of treading water, the chimera reached the murky shores his home.
Quickly leaving the machinery-plagued coast, Warwick entered the thick city in its fullest. Lurking, leaping, and otherwise sneaking through its shadows, he could see that Zaun was still the infested cesspool he freshly remembered it being. Having clambered upon a tall-standing house to get a better view of his surroundings, he took in a deep breath of its fume-filled air. Its towers were tall and its streets were filled to their overcrowded brim with pedestrians; workers; marketeers, both honest and otherwise; cutthroats-for-hire and good-for-nothing scoundrels aplenty.
From its largest factory's tallest, purple smoke-spewing chimney stack, to its smallest and most lifeless (though at times lively) green puddle laying near the drainpipes of its most uninhabited district, it was Zaun. It was all its outside reputation was, and more. Ruled by the corrupt and given life by the downtrodden or ambitious, Zaun was a one of a kind place in the already wide and rough world of Runeterra. Had he not been the wrathful vigilante he was, it would not have been Warwick's first choice for locale. But its familiarity to him was... enough.
Eventually dropping down from the building and traveling further onward, Warwick soon reached the location that led to his home. It was a large, crusty, white-tinted pipeline that formed an entrance to the sewer, sitting in between one of the many local dumps and a bakery that had been built who-knows-how-many years back. With caution in his movement, he slunk inside before anyone could claim to have witnessed the dreaded 'Howler' - one of many great and terrible names he had been given since gaining notoriety for his deeds. A few dozen meters of walking through knee-high sludge later, he reached his den held within the sewer's labyrinthine depths. His home, if he dared even call it that.
Aside from being constructed on dry ground that went above the gunk his feet currently traipsed through, his abode was nothing special. Carved deep into the brick-laden wall, its quarters were rather cramped for a large creature such as he. Pieces of random scrap and junk he had collected over the long months, equally from his victims and the trash, littered the den at random like ruined trophies. He had enough intelligence to form a bed from the more comfortable parts he stole or gained from the scrap-pile, but that was its biggest feature by far.
Drying off his rear paws, he entered the lair, pushing aside that which was in his way until he reached and collapsed upon his bed. He felt weary from his travel from Ionia to here, and for right now, he wanted nothing more than to sleep. But no matter how weary he was, it just barely escaped his grasp. To aid him in it, he tried to imagine something pleasant. Something to soothe him. And the first image to pop up that matched that description was when he was under the care of the strange, magically-attuned woman from that odd, peaceful grove; Soraka, he delightfully remembered her name being.
His thoughts drifting to it, to that wondrous moment when he laid upon her lap as she sung to him, he soon and finally fell into a deep sleep.
