EDIT:(Don't write while drunk, kids. Muh spellings!)
The plains beside the river were fragrant with the scent of night-blooming wildflowers. She breathed the cool dusk air in deeply, gazing up at the bright constellations she could not name, but which were comforting in their familiarity all the same as they peeked beyond the veil of fast-fading twilight. The sun was no longer visible over the distant hills, the last radiant glory of its light reduced to a weak, pale amythest wash over the landscape, casting almost no shadows.
The long, wild grass beneath her tired body was damp with dew but she could not quite bring herself to roll closer to her campfire, onto clearer ground strewn with bare patches where her few belongings lay in a lazy pile upon the thin sleeping mat she had not yet bothered to unroll. She lay enjoying the peace, the silence, an almost reverent look on her face as her eyes sought something further than the sky, further than the stars. As the night shrouded the land at last, and the twinkling of stars was joined by the gentle, fleeting lights of fireflies, the woman slid off into a peaceful and dreamless sleep.
When she awoke it was dawn, and she somewhat regretted not choosing better ground on which to lie - her thick travelling cloak which she had unconciously twisted herself into as she slept had kept her relatively warm, but her joints ached and her feet in their battered leather sandals were quite numb from the nipping of the night air. The woman stretched, long and laboriously like a cat, and swept her unruly pale hair from her face. The sunrise was magnificent, and the beauty of it was not lost upon her, the hazy sky painted a soothing rosy pink, shot through with streaks of pure gold and orange as the sunlight illuminated the wispy clouds like a wildfire in the sky. She took a few moments to admire it as she went about her buisness - burying the long-dead embers of her fire and scattering the rocks that contained it, stowing her things into a sturdy leather pack which she slung beneath her cloak and over her shoulder.
Much more reverance she paid to one particular item, however. Wrapped in a heavy oilcloth that smelled of smoke and earth, an object almost as wide as she was at the waist, and longer than her arm. It looked very much solid and hefty, but she took it from its resting place on a bare patch of brown, sandy earth as easily as if it was a roll of paper. She took several long straps of leather, belted together into two continuous lengths, and formed a makeshift harness. This she attached to a thick, heavy belt that hung loose around her hips and was etched with intricate patterns much like ivy. The wrapped object was also soon concealed beneath the folds of her cloak, no more than a vague idea of a shape that could sometimes be seen when the heavy material swayed against and around it.
She brushed some specks of dirt from her pale, faded tunic and set about filling a tough old waterskin from the river, everything else having been squared away. She swiped away some tiny biting flies that rose like a wisp of smoke from the grasses as she leaned into the river, the cold of the merrily gurgling water refreshing on her tanned skin, soaking through the bandages that bound both her forearms. She secured her waterskin at her side and drank from the river with cupped hands, then with a few splashes of water washed her face. The piping alarm call of a bird, the species of which she did not recognize rang out across the windless air - suddenly very alert, she paused to listen. Few travellers came this way, and she did not wish to attract the attention of bandits or other such undesirables. But, she heard nothing else as she turned her head this way and that, listening like a fox does for threats. Peace settled again on the plains. At the very edge of her distance she could see something - perhaps a deer, across the river, but it did not concern her and the sentiment was returned, as it lowered its head to the ground as though grazing.
It was time to go, so she straightened up and fell into a brisk walk, headed for the distant hills, the sight of which brought a lump to her throat and thoughts which made her shiver.
The closer she got, the less life she saw. There were no birds, few insects, and no ground-dwelling wildlife either. The ground grew rockier, dustier beneath her feet, and the slopes steeper. She did not stumble, picking her way carefully up the hill like a mountain goat. It was tiring work, however, and she sweated profusely beneath her travelling cloak. The sun was at its zenith now, and beat down with a merciless heat that dried the woman's mouth and burned what little skin was exposed to it. The clouds that had been present that morning had dissapated or drifted away, so there was nothing to dull it, or shelter her. She felt quite vulnerable on that hillside, truth be told, but she pressed on doggedly until she crested the hill and found herself looking down on sharp cliffs and canyons, carved over millenia by rivers long run dry and scouring winds into an intricate network of passages and valleys and steep inclines.
One valley in particular sunk deeply into the earth like an old wound, yawning open for miles across the landscape, half eclipsed in shadow. The earth there had a strange mottled tinge, but it was not from foilage or anything alive.
The woman shuddered, as she knew all too well what tinged the parched soil.
But as much as it unsettled her, she knew this was her destination, and that she must press on, down into the jagged maw of Couer Valley.
Her feet hit the valley floor with a crunch as she hopped off of a small ledge, the dirt forming a flaking crust. When it rained in the mountains nearby, the valley would sometimes flood, but no water had touched this earth for years now and the ground had split and cracked under the glare of the sun and the weight of time. She shielded her eyes against the light as she looked around, stopping for a moment to catch her breath. Far down the valley, something glinted in the sunlight, unfamiliar but beckoning. And very close by, scattered shapes lying in the dust, which the woman decided to investigate first as she took a long swig of her waterskin.
The heavy wooden beams which had once formed a terrifying juggernaut of war were now seperated and half-rotted. Rusted plates of iron, streaked with corrosion, patched the joints where the wood was joined with heavy rivets and formed an unrecognizable mass that might once have held mechanisms and fine workings, but now was a decayed metal shell. The ground around it seemed to shrink away from it, the main body of the thing lying in a shallow pit, the earth stained with a sickly greenish hue around it. The earth directly beneath it looked as though it had once boiled, bubbles frozen in dirt and dust and time.
The sight of the broken-down Melter brought back horrific memories. The woman wrapped her arms around herself, arms which throbbed with a phantom pain, but forced herself to examine the object without touching it. She would not touch it, nor the ground on which it lay, and never would for all the gold in the world. Her mahogany eyes were dark, clouded, seeing not just the husk of the war machine but also what it once was, what it once did. She turned away suddenly, a shadow of agony passing over her downturned face, and stood with her back on it. She almost didn't see the pale, white shape half-buried in loose dust and dirt - as bland and shapeless as the rest of the valley floor it seemed, until she registered the shadows upon it. The cracks, which spread down across the empty sockets, and the permanant grin of off-white teeth biting into the dust.
A vicious satisfaction came over her. Good. If that was the machine's operater, good.
She walked off, towards the tantalizing glint, taking note of everything else that stood out to her in the valley. Many other bones were visible, and the woman could see weapons sunk into the dirt, a sword lying in the shelter of a bleached ribcage, an axe still grasped in skeletal fingers. The woman made a small, strangled noise as she noticed, horrified, that many of the skeletons seemed to have been disintegrated in places, melted, sloughed away. She forced herself to look, long and hard, a bitterness welling in her chest as she did so.
She wondered how many of them had been men and women known to her, how many had been enemies. Here and there a piece of battered, corroded metal lay, armor that had survived the teeth of time. She turned over one such piece with her foot, and clenched a fist to her chest. The motif was faded, but still legible - a stylized, glaring skull on a background of green-tinged metal. Her eyes were hard and cold, not betraying the guilt and turmoil she felt.
She remembered it all too well - how could she ever forget? And how could she have survived, choking in the dust beside her comrades and opponents as the vile chemicals ate through the flesh of her arms, when nobody else of her company did? Guilt at having survived ate at her, like poison in a still-bleeding wound. By all rights her bones should be resting in this old battlefield alongside these other fallen soldiers. She knew it was nothing but dumb luck that saved her, not the strength she had once taken so much pride in, nor her own cunning. This as much as anything festered in her mind. All her life, she had been told to live by her own strength as law. And she had, gladly, and proudly, for she was strong and there was little she desired and could not take.
And yet, at the behest of her own nation, the nation that was founded on strength and pride - that strength had been cast aside like a broken toy, that law had been abandoned in what she saw as the most cowardly manner possible. To die in war was an expected and comfortable end to any Noxian - the strong would triumph over the weak, and would in turn be triumphed over when they had lived long enough and their strength had faded. To be strong and win your battles was great, to be strong and die at the hands of someone stronger wasn't much worse, given you put up a damn good fight - and every Noxian tirelessly strived to be that stronger person, testing their power and will against everyone they could all through their lives. The Zaunite mercanaries, with their hateful chemicals and wicked machines of terror, had stripped that honor from their war, had soiled the name of Noxus by toppling that proud balance and law on its head. The strong died without a chance to show their strength, died in writhing agony beside the weak, when they should have triumphed. The natural order was upset, the battle pointless, pride all but forgotten.
And what for? How was a battle won when both sides died, and only the borrowed hands of another nation walked away alive?
It still brought a rage to her, even as it brought sorrow and pain. The weight of hundreds of lost souls bore down upon her heart, was carried in the swing of her arms, echoed in her voice. She would never forget this disgrace, this betrayal. In just one day and just one night, this woman had lost everything. But she still had her pride, she still had her strength, she still had her values - though time and worldly experience had tempered them somewhat. Noxus had fallen to a new low, and she would never again bend her knee to such shameless masters. She wondered with a humorless smile how many of her fallen bretheren would have shared her sentiment, had they lived. She would bet anything that almost all of them did.
The woman stood silent, vigilant. She looked, unseeing, still hearing the echoes of battle even though the air was deathly silent. A gentle wind picked up, blowing down the valley and ruffling her hair, startling her from her reverie. It brought dust and little refreshment from the heat, and reminded her of the dry, stale feeling in her mouth. She drank from her waterskin again, careful of the amount left. The river was half a day away, but she did not wish to retrace her route.
She remembered the strange glint she'd seen down the valley. Curiosity drove her to keep walking on, though her mind wheeled with dark thoughts and darker memories. She had never quite allowed herself to grieve, to mourn her comrades, her honor, her past life. It had weighed heavily on her over the years, and today she had come here in an attempt to lighten the load on her spirit. She didn't quite know how she would do that, though. So she walked, and she walked, and walked on, taking in the grim scenery solemnly, stopping every now and again as things caught her eye.
It was much further away than she thought, and the sun was starting to descend, bringing a blessed relief from the heat as the skies lost some of their fire and the shadows grew longer. The thought of spending the night in this forsaken place was not a pleasant one to her - but something compelled her to stay, to remain in this place of lost souls and echoes.
She drew her cloak tighter around herself, shivering as if from cold. But she was strong. She would not fall to dust and shadows and memories. She was strong, stronger than those who had once commanded her - she would not allow their crimes to crush her spirit. She would not surrender to memory and shame. Not even if they hunted her down and tore her last breath from her lungs with the hateful steel of their assassins like the cowards they were.
As she drew closer she realised that the glint of sunlight was actually the light catching the top of a large, polished stone carved with typical Ionian designs and what could be words, still too distant to be legible. A war memorial - The Ionian Mantle of Decorum was displayed in proud relief on the monument, one of the highest honors a soldier could recieve.
Noxians did not honor their dead with any more than gravestones. Those who committed great deeds of strength and glory were immortalized in song or legend, but war memorials were a foreign concept, as a soldier who did not return home was simply a soldier who was not strong enough, and therfor not worth commemorating. Or at least, that was the theory - once. Now, the woman knew differently.
Still, she wondered at the great, engraved monolith. She had seen war memorials before, but never expected to see one in this tainted place. The Ionian militants who died here were not trained soldiers, though she knew them for a formidable and ferocious foe. That too was a strange concept for the woman once, for in Noxus every child is trained from birth to kill, with few exceptions. Not all chose to stay as such, but a minimum period of four years serving in the army was mandatory to all citizens. It was a rite of passage to adulthood, which some - like the woman herself - undertook far earlier than others.
The Ionians had fought viciously, laying a clever trap for Fury company, even being so bold as to use a child as bait. Seeing the girl stumbling, apparently shell-shocked, from the field of fallen bodies, only for those bodies to rise around them - it was not something she'd been prepared for. Riven felt she should have died that day - not destroyed by chemicals, but on the end of an Ionian sword, preferably after taking half of them with her. She had to admire their strength and ruthlessness, for a nation of technical pacifists. By all rights they should have won that fight, as the next nearest company was far from them and they were outnumbered heavily. She would not have begrudged them their victory - they were just trying to defend their lives, after all, and she was just trying to follow orders.
Nobody, not the Noxians and not the Ionians, had deserved what happened that day.
She felt a wave of tiredness come over her, even though she'd slept well. Her food supplies had run out the day before yesterday though, as her stomach reminded her every now and then. Hunger gnawed at her painfully and her energy levels were lower than normal as a result.
She was in the stone's shadow now, though, and it drew her like a moth to flame. It was a large monolith wider than it was tall, tapering off halfway up to a triangle point. Sweeping waves and the branches of a tree, blossoms falling in an invisible breeze, were rendered artfully onto the face of the memorial around the sides. And then a neat, thin border around the etched text in the centre - Most of it was written in traditional Ionian, of which the woman understood almost nothing. Some of it was in the common Valoranian tongue though, and this she traced with calloused fingers.
She was surprised by what she could read. Added on at the bottom, in slightly smaller etching below the Ionian but above the list of names, was a small paragraph that made her eyes widen and a lump form in her throat.
Also remembered here are the fallen members of Fury Company of the Noxian Army - we are all brothers and sisters in death. Though their bones lie on the earth, may their spirits may find peace in the afterlife, and may they be judged fairly.
She would never have expected such compassion from an enemy with whom her people had so cruelly and fiercely fought. To honor the invading force on a war memorial for their own fallen - Ionians were full of surprises. The gesture touched the woman deeply, however strange it seemed to her. She wondered who had suggested it, and how it had initially been recieved.
She felt guilt for a wide range of reasons, but not usually for killing - that mark, she reasoned, was more on the conscience of those who commanded her rather than she who simply carried out orders. She had never killed needlessly, though she knew some of her kin did. She enjoyed fighting - it was her whole reason for being, but killing was a chore to her, something she did simply because it was required of her.
So why did she feel ashamed now?
She was not an overly emotional woman. She had her occasional flares of temper, and found pleasure in simple things, but she kept her buisness and her feelings as seperate as possible. It was hard to carry on, otherwise. But as she blinked heavily, droplets stained the dust below her, and before she even registered her tears she was kneeling on the plinth, sobbing quietly, fist pressed to her lips to muffle her cries. She was alone though, not a soul for miles - and as this occured to her, she allowed herself the mercy of dropping all pretenses and letting out her grief in earnest. She had never cried like that before, but once she started she could not stop - with a harsh yell, face upturned to the darkening twilight and contorted in agony, she surrendered to her melancholy.
Curled in on herself with her back to the memorial and her arms around her knees, wrapped in her cloak as if to hide herself from the world, she eventually cried herself to sleep beneath the stars.