Floating in a slow, hypnotic orbit around her were the fragments of her family’s crest. To an outsider, they were just jagged pieces of metal. To her, they were the weight of a thousand years of tradition, shattered by a conqueror's boot and reforged by the rhythm of her own soul.
"Father, Mother, Zelos, Ohma, Kai, Ruu..." she whispered, her voice steady against the wind.
The sky over Ionia was not blue; it was the color of bruised plums and smoke.
Irelia stood at the edge of the Navori cliffs, her breath hitching in the cold morning air. Before her stretched a panorama that no camera could truly capture—a vast, cinematic expanse of rolling jade hills clashing against the steel-grey tide of the Noxian vanguard. She didn't look at the army. She looked at the shards.