Chapter Text
Rain fell heavy against the rigid envelope of the airship as it bobbed violently in the storm like a cork dropped in a sump. It had swept in a few hours ago out of nowhere. Well, probably not out of nowhere, but Jinx had no frame of reference for what good or bad weather looked like coming in, except for the obvious. She wasn’t exactly an aeronaut, whatever her childhood dreams might have once entailed.
Besides, it’s not like she had a flight plan.
Or a manifest.
Or a crew.
What she had was a stolen airship, a weapon built out of spare hextech and scrap that probably counted as ordnance, and some voices that wouldn’t. Shut. Up. Since she’d had no idea where she was heading in the first place, except away, she’d just pointed her nose west to the Conquerer’s Sea and gone with the wind.
As it happened, not even the wind liked her.
Thanks, Janna.
Now, the storm was trying to heave her out of the sky, and it was so dark she couldn’t even tell if she was still over the water or if falling out of the firmament would mean getting real intimate with the fundament. Honestly, at this point, Jinx wasn’t sure if she actually cared. Her whole intention was to get far enough away from Piltover and Zaun that the cycle would finally end. Far enough away that Kitty Cait wouldn’t have to hunt her, Vi wouldn’t come looking for her, and the rest of Zaun could put her out of mind. She hadn’t planned it much further than that because that had been the goal, and once Piltover had vanished behind the horizon, well…mission accomplished.
“Hey, Dad, look at me,” Jinx muttered from the corner of the ship’s gondola, where she was huddled up in a ball, rocking with the wind. “I finally got somethin’ right.”
At the other end of the gondola lay her weapon. Fishbones and Pow-Pow—the former of which was staring at her from its side. It had one mismatched blue eye, gleaming in the darkness as it assured her that she had done plenty right in her life. That she had been a good daughter. That she had been perfect.
Perfect.
Jinx scoffed. She didn’t know what perfect looked like, but it wasn’t whatever looked back from the mirror at her. But then, he was sort of obligated to say that, wasn’t he?
At the fore of the gondola, the helm creaked and moaned. She’d lashed a bunch of cables and rope around it to keep it basically pointing straight, but the winds weren’t having it. The heading she’d tried to anchor herself to was more of a polite suggestion at this point, and the winds were not feeling particularly accepting.
In theory, Jinx supposed she could probably muscle the ship into something like a sane direction, but, again, what was the point?
She wasn’t going anywhere.
That was why she had ridden the winds for days and days and days. The airship had enough supplies for a crew of ten, so a crew of one was barely making a dent in it. She crossed the breadth of the Conquerer’s sea and had emerged into the ocean proper. She had flipped a coin, and it had landed on cogs, so she turned north and kept the coast in view, but only because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to navigate otherwise.
Now?
Shit, now she had no idea where she was.
Reaching into her pack, Jinx pulled out a dented, bowl-shaped metal miner’s cap covered in crude chemical paints. She licked suddenly dry lips, and turned around until the cracked goggles were showing on it. The designs on that side were gone—blasted away and rendered black. It was half melted from that side, and suddenly, Jinx couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t do anything but stare into those fractured lenses and cry.
Then, there was a flash and deafening boom of lightning, and the airship pitched violently. Jinx flew from one side of the cabin to the other, hit the wall hard, and then dropped to the ground as the world spun around her. She was falling. She knew that much. She was good at that part. At figuring out which way was down.
As everything turned to chaos, it all slowed down. It was the shimmer. It made the world seem to be moving so slowly. Jinx looked up briefly and stared at the helm of the ship. Maybe she could muscle it into stability. Make a controlled landing.
Maybe she could.
Instead, she curled around fishbones, pow-pow, and the metal miner’s cap, hugged them all to herself, and waited for the noise to stop. If she were lucky, the noise would stop for good.
The morning dawned over a wreckage. Smoke rose from the sodden mass of shattered wood and metal that lay strewn across the verge of the forest. It was a righteous mess and far, far too close to the inner kingdom for the guard to be comfortable with it. That was why she was out there.
Quinn knelt amidst the wreck and sifted through it while her companion, Valor—a rare and intelligent azurite eagle—did circuits overhead. It had crashed during the storm three nights ago, and the first scout company of the Dauntless Vanguard had been deployed as soon as a runner reached High Silvermere to tell them that the oily plume of smoke they’d been seeing wasn’t from a local fire.
It was hard to believe anything could survive such an impact, though. The mountains dividing Demacia from the western Freljord were massive, craggy things of grey stone, and whatever this thing had been, it had plowed right into the foothills. It hit hard enough to dig a trench and scrape bedrock.
If there was anyone on board, they had to be dead.
That was Quinn’s assessment going in, and she had prepared herself to see a real bad sight whenever she got to where the crew must have huddled up. Except, no matter how she and her scouts searched, and no matter how many bits of deck they turned over in expectation of finding a bloody ruin, there was nothing.
No one.
Quinn kicked another plank over but there just more fragments of metal. Gears and whatnot. They probably all had names, but she was no siegesmith. Was it unmanned? Some experimental airship that got swept up in the storm?
Valor’s cry drew her head up with a snap, and she traced the blue streak of her companion as he wheeled and dove down before flaring his massive wings and alighting upon a bent metal strut. He let out another harsh cry as Quinn reached him. “Yes, yes, I heard you, old man. What’ve you found?”
Another raspier caw answered as Valor pecked at the metal strut, then jerked his head away from it. Quinn followed the angle he’d given to yet another identical pile of wreckage, but if Valor said there was something there, then there was something there. She sifted through it and eventually found what looked like the shredded remains of a heavily stylized hood that seemed to suggest the maw of some aquatic predator. It had a few strands of blue hair matted to the inside by old blood, but other than that, it was just scraps.
It did confirm one thing, though.
“So someone was on board,” Quinn muttered, shaking her head in disbelief. “But how did they survive?”
She looked up from the wreck and scowled. There was no possibility of finding tracks. Not with the ground like this. Everything had been ripped to shreds, and there had been another rain since the storm. Plus, in theory, if whoever had survived had tried for the nearest settlement, that would only have been High Silvermere, and that’s where she’d come from.
They should have encountered them.
Grimacing, Quinn looked up at Valor. “Might not’ve seen the city during the storm, you think? You didn’t see anything strange on our way out here, did you?’
Valor cawed.
“Well, naturally, I don’t count wildlife…no offense.”
Another caw.
“What do you mean ‘a weird cat’? And what’s ‘weird’ by your standards?” Caw. “It smelled funny? That’s it?” Quinn shook her head. “No, I uh, I don’t think the Marshal is going to cordon off the western forest on account of a weird and funny-smelling cat.”
Sighing, she turned away from Valor and looked south. There was a fishing village several days south on the coast. It’s feasible that might’ve been the last thing they saw. Even if it wasn’t, smart odds were on a coastal route. Anyone with a lick of sense knew that if you were lost in the wild, you should find and follow a coast—river or ocean—because people tend to build on them.
Whoever had been aboard this must’ve been clever. An aeronaut, maybe. Or something like it.
“Alright, let’s go tell everyone we’re heading south,” Quinn drawled as she started walking. “And let’s hope this isn’t just some wild krug chase.”
Caw!
“Kayle forfend, Valor, I don’t care about the damn cat or what it smelled like! You need get your eyes checked, old man. We’re looking for a person…wounded and probably badly. I doubt you’d confuse a wounded aeronaut for a bloody cat!”
At least she hoped not.
Gods, that would be embarrassing.