"Bring your blades with you for your next assessment," Zed had instructed her when she came to return the week's set of scrolls. Over two months had passed since Irelia first been inducted into the order, and between her supplemental readings and extra practice with Kayn, she was finally finding her speed. She retrieved the small chest containing the remnants of her family's crest from her small pile of belongings.

"It's been a long time," she expressed as if she were speaking to an old friend. She summoned them around her with a wave of her arm, happy to see the familiar glints of steel. They settled behind her in the same formation they'd been in when she first reached the island, and she made her way to the training grounds.

Master Zed and Kayn were already waiting for her next to one of the rings.

"Have you prepared for your trial?" Zed asked his student.

Irelia nodded in before turning to Kayn confidently. "I will be the one to win this time."

"Kayn will not be your opponent today," Zed corrected her, which appeared to be a surprise to them both.

"I won't?" Kayn asked, seemingly bringing his own weapon for nothing.

"Not today," Zed explained as he summoned one of his shadow clones into the ring. "But you may spectate if you'd like."

"Good luck," Kayn called teasingly as he perched himself atop one of the guardian statues. He knew full well how the match would end, but he also knew that as long as Irelia gave a good enough showing, she at least had the chance to be promoted.

She had the skill – Their training together had long since proved it. Whether or not she could perform against another opponent that would be the true deciding factor.

Irelia barely heard the taunt as her face paled, suddenly taken with apprehension. She had only observed her master's fighting style a handful of times while he had been training the higher grade acoltyes. And could an entity of shadow even be pierced? She wasn't sure. To face him now seemed like quite the daunting task.

"This one only contains around fifteen percent of my true strength," Zed explained, sensing her fear. "If you cannot defeat it, you are not ready to advance."

"Understood," she replied, trying to calm herself. She had been prepared, been ready, only moments before, a change in opponents should make little difference.

"Show me what you have learned, Irelia," he told her, the clone mimicking the action of brandishing its claws.

Her heart began to race as her blades readied themselves to her sides. I can do this.

"Let's begin."


The rest of the day was spent in recovery.

Even weapons made of shadow were sharp enough to cut, it seemed, as Irelia had sustained lacerations of varying lengths and depths all over her body. Though mostly on the defensive, she had been able to recognize and take advantage of her opponent's openings. It had been difficult to gauge how well she'd performed however, considering her enemy was immune to being punctured, unlike herself.

Eventually her energy had been depleted and her knees gave out on her, which was when Zed ceased his assault and hoisted her onto his back so he could carry her to the infirmary.

"That was really only fifteen percent?" the girl questioned jokingly him between ragged breaths. It was expressed more in coping really, as the lack of a definitive result after her defeat had left her anxious.

"Fifteen percent indeed," Zed replied with a small chuckle. "But you do know that winning was not what was required of you."

He felt her head lift itself from his shoulder.

"I am able to receive tactile feedback from my clones. Against an opponent of lower skill, some of your strikes would prove fatal," Zed continued, mildly impressed.

She nodded into his cloak, "One of the scrolls you gave me talked about targeting the vital organs, so I aimed for them when I could."

"That's good," he told her. "You are a fine student, Irelia. Your instinct and skill have improved vastly."

"So does that mean...?" she began tentatively, trying not to hold her breath.

"You've advanced," he confirmed, smiling from behind his mask.

"Thank you, master!" Irelia chimed, grip tightening around him with new evergy.

"Do not celebrate yet, child." Zed reminded her as the screen door in front of them slid open. "You still have a ways to go."

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"I thought we could read this today," Irelia told him, placing a thick book onto the table with a thud. While their extra combat training was usually performed before dinner, the studious aspects occurred an hour or so before their bedtime so that they would be seldom disturbed.

Kayn read over the characters on the cover, sweeping away the dust she had missed. "Folktalkes?"

"I found it in the archives and thought you might like to learn them too," she said, quite proud of her logic. "Are you familiar with any?"

"Not really," he admitted. Some of the others had recounted a few to him when he had first been taken in, but they were difficult to remember among the many other tasks he'd needed to learn quickly.

"That's good, then. You can try reading them and I'll correct you," Irelia instructed, turning the pages to settle on one of the most widely known stories. The illustration showed a great tree, leaves dyed with green ink aside from the occasional addition of gold leaf with animals of all sorts surrounding its trunk.

"The God Willow," Kayn read aloud, the title at least recognizable to him. As he began to read aloud, he noticed he was stopping for clarification far less than he used to.

"The branches began to envelop him, and the captain saw–" he brought his eyes closer to the pages.

"Beauty," Irelia informed him, making note of each character he'd struggled with so he could practice them later. The words he struggled with now were ones he would not find in the training manuals.

"Beauty," he repeated, multiple times in his head so he might remember. "In their grief and began to regret his actions. He watched time flow forward, the life cycle unraveling itself before him..."

He concluded the tale, reading about how the new Green Father traveling across the different lands in hope of understanding the world's creatures.

"Has anyone actually seen him?" Kayn asked curiously, wondering what a walking, talking, ten-foot tree might look like in person.

"Not that I know of," Irelia replied with some thought, but it was true that Ionia was a place where many such myths had proven themselves a reality. "But there have been rumors of such a creature among the Vastayan tribes."

She handed him the parchment she'd been recording on after dividing it into columns. Kayn began carefully practicing the stroke order, reciting the meaning of each word as he did so.

"How about tales from your homeland?" She asked him suddenly, seeing the calligraphy pen stop and his eyes divert from his work. "Can you tell me any?"

His shoulders tensed. It had become all too apparent that Noxus was a place he'd wanted to forget, but it was an opportunity for her to learn as well. If not about Noxus itself then maybe about Kayn and the boy he was before all this.

"...Noxus Prime is made of the immortal bastion, its stone walls taller than anything you'll ever see," he told her eventually, remembering the towering walls from the slums surrounding its perimeter. "It was said to be constructed and ruled by a cruel king, made immortal with necromancy. He enslaved the most powerful warriors and mages to reign terror over the lands."

"That's horrible! What happened to him?"

"Eventually the people rose up against him and a single man was able to steal the king's skull. Without a complete skeleton, he was unable to be resurrected after being torn apart, limb from limb," Kayn finished with a flat expression.

"Was there no happy ending?" she frowned, elbows propped up onto the table.

"The people were freed, but then Noxus came to rise," he answered grimly before returning to his practice. "And that brings us here."

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She had been chosen to participate in her first raid a few weeks following her advancement.

It was supposed to be an easy mission according to her master – infiltrate the temple under the control of the Noxian army and procure any items of value.

"You are to follow me to the catacombs," Zed told her along with a group of others during their briefing. "We wait for the interception group to carve a path, when the focus on retrieval."

She remembered agreeing eagerly. After all, it had all sounded simple enough.

But when the time came, it suddenly wasn't.

With the retrieval group engaged in combat as planned, Irelia had been positioned behind Zed with two of the higher grade acolytes behind her creating a delta formation. Any remaining enemies were dealt with quickly and quietly before she could even think to be proactive about attacking. As they proceeded further into the temple, the ground became slick with blood of both friend and foe, and the foul stench lingered all the way to the treasure vaults.

As more Noxians revealed themselves, Irelia found herself ducking as a spear embedded itself in the wall where her head had been.

"Watch yourself," Ahno reminded her calmly, disappearing from the torchlight. In an instant he'd materialized behind the attacker, slitting his throat in a single calculated motion.

Her insides lurched as he kicked the body down the stairwell and out of their way, the corpse's eyes rolling into the back of its head.

Reaching the first of the vaults, it seemed as though the Noxian soldiers had stockpiled most of the artifacts already to be easily transported. Half of the team stayed to retrieve the treasures while Irelia, Zed, and the others continued on to what looked like a library of sorts.

"Take what is useful. I trust your judgment," the shadow master spoke. They were specifically looking for any material related to the dark arts, but as she scanned the drawers and shelves Irelia found her face clammy, breathing uneven, and palms slick. She had barely been able to make out the titles of some of the tomes, and eventually settled on white-knuckling a few at random and praying their content would be of use.

Another band of Noxian survivors were waiting outside to meet them in numbers that left the rest of her comrades suddenly occupied. As one of the soldiers began to charge in her direction, she allowed her blades to parry him defensively. But the shallow cuts were not enough to deter the man, as he reached his thick arms out to capture her small figure.

The action that only registered when it was too late, and although she managed to pull her arm out of the way, the man ended up grabbing a fistful of her hair instead. The sudden pull threw her off balance, and Irelia found herself flailing to escape as he gripped the strands closer to their roots to lift her feet clear off the ground.

"Do not hesitate, Irelia!" she heard her master call from afar as she winced against her enemy's grip. Her scalp felt like it would tear completely, and out of the corner of her eye she spotted the blade of a sword high in the air preparing to end her.

Feeling tears beginning to sting at the corners of her eyes, she finally expelled a pained shriek to command her blades to attack. It was a similar command to the one she had unknowingly channeled walls of her home, only this time her aim and purpose was deliberate. Two blades cut through the ligaments of each knee so the man would buckle, another two cut clean through his liver, and the last sliced the column of his neck through both the carotid arteries to ensure his defeat. The vessels immediately ruptured and the man dropped into a puddle of his own blood.

Finally freed, Irelia hastily recovered the stolen loot only to find her ninja-gi stained red and her stomach queasy.

"We're leaving," the Master of Shadows announced, rallying the remaining Order of Shadow members to retreat. Irelia was able to follow but was clearly shaken, feeling Ahno place a hand on her back to lead her forward.

"Burn it to the ground," Zed ordered once all their survivors had assembled. Within minutes, the entire temple was set ablaze in a mixture of magic and Hextech. The smell of ashes and charred flesh invaded her nose, and then all at once it was too much.

Dropping the texts entirely, Irelia lurched forward to vomit into the nearest bush.

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The night of their return, six floating lanters glowed upon the shore's edge – one for each of their fallen comrades.

Irelia watched them sail into the night, reminding herself that she could have easily been the seventh.

She had been walking among the taller adults on the travel back to the temple in hopes of avoiding Kayn, but he ended up weaving through the crowd to find her anyway.

"How was it?" he asked when he finally caught up to her. He had been nothing but encouraging before her departure, but she couldn't help but feel like she would let him down if she were to be honest with him about what happened.

So she chose to say nothing, letting the silence speak for her.

There was a pause as he tried examining her face through the shadows of the forest.

"Was it really that bad?" the younger boy questioned as they continued to traverse the stone paths leading to the monastery. "I mean, you survived, didn't you?"

Irelia felt a lump form in her throat. She had survived indeed, but why did she feel like it had been at the cost of something far beyond her?

"How are you able to take another person's life so easily?" Irelia finally spoke, her usually bright spirit diminished by the thoughts continuing to plague her.

Kayn tried searching for a way to explain, which was not easy for someone who'd needed to fight to survive for as long as he could remember.

"If you think about it, it's like an ultimatum," he said, picturing the mud and river reeds on the day he had been meant to die. "Your enemy is trying to kill you, whether or not you hesitate. So you either let them, or kill them first. It's that simple."

Irelia sighed heavily, knowing full well he was right. The man had clearly been intent on taking her life, so why had she been so reluctant to take his?

"You'll get used to it," Kayn told her, eyes forward. "You have to, if you want to survive."

His words constricted painfully around her heart, feeling it sink within her chest until she heard him mumble something quietly into the trees.

"And I hope you do."

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During her next raid, Irelia manages to kill an enemy without retching.

Another month and she's taken down more enemies than she can count on one hand.

And in one year, she doesn't even flinch when she hears her opponents hit the ground behind her.

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Finally finished this chapter. I'm hoping for an update every week or two so hopefully I don't fall behind. As always, I'd love it if you left me feedback via reviews, and any ideas are also welcome!