Morgana

This story begins by pure chance. That is to say, it begins with somebody who will have no bearing on how it ends.

A single candle, lit and burning in a shrine at the top of the prison in the center of Demacia, flickered suddenly and split. The twin orange flames licked about, intertwined, rising from the smoking wick and into the air. The color of their light held firm for a moment, before burning deep red and casting shadows around the near-empty room. The crimson darkened, blues meeting the reds, shifting to light purple and sucking the air from the room as the twin flames grew greater and greater. A pillar of light, built from the base of a candle, extended out and pierced through the grated window into the sunlit sky. Still, the candle burned. Brighter and brighter, without relent. The sole figure in the cell threw herself to her knees before it, the fire crackling hot enough to rend flesh from bone. Outside, as the flame grew, the brightness seemed to dim the sky itself around it. What began as a small distraction, grew to blot the sky. In a moment, the flame from the tower blotted the sun, leaving the whole of the city square under a blanket of green flame. From the windows, the smoke came. The barred windows burst, smoke and flame pouring forth as a body, wrapped in violet inferno, fell from the building.

Somewhere, farther than distance could measure, the girl fell from the sky into the court of the Veiled Lady. She gathered herself, knelt before the angel in front of her, and became part of the chain.

“So much pomp and circumstance.” The angel scoffed.

The chain locked, taught and the court shimmered, then vanished. The angel was kneeling in her garden. A sproutling, core cloaked in dirt, lay discarded on the ground. The bulb of earth about the roots had burst and the roots lay exposed to the air. The angel sighed and did her best to pack the dirt back around the roots.

“And that’s why you’re part of the chain. You nearly killed one of my perennials.”

She finished planting and stood, wings shifting uncomfortably behind her back. Something was off. She tried to shrug it off as a kink in her neck, but the forest was quieter than it should have been. She glanced at the shrine to herself for a moment, then to a cluster of trees where the discomfort seemed to be the most tightly packed. With a sigh, she stepped into the untamed green.

Life… pulsed, for lack of a better word. Not in the crude biological sense, but in the energy it let off. As bodies worked, they created and consumed small doses of their own regulatory hormones and energies. It was like an inhale and an exhale. When it was off, when something wasn’t right, with the right set of eyes the pulse came erratically. The pulse was subject to a lot around it, immensely fragile in its way, even if it couldn’t truly be broken. **** was a cooldown, when the life present let out a last exhale and the energy fed into the earth. The only thing that disrupted the pulse strongly enough to notice and for long enough to notice was pain. All of her subjects came to her in pain, with a pulse thrown off. Whether they be long-sufferers, vengeance seekers, or misplaced playthings. All of them beat incorrectly, all of them had a pulse that somebody else had interfered with. Justice, in a purely utilitarian sense, became that which did not disrupt harmony.

Or at the very least, if it didn’t disrupt harmony, it didn’t get her attention. Her sister could take the moralistic causes, she could be the one to define justice and tell other people what was and wasn’t it. Her sister had been the one with the long list of things that set her off. For Morgana, it had always been simple. Don’t fuck with the pulse. Don’t fuck with me. Don’t fuck with the garden.

When she stepped into the clearing where it was happening, it was almost ****. It was like the world had stopped rotating, all rubbernecking the same cluster of black and violet that lay almost haphazardly dejected on the ground. For something so small and so plain, it seemed to grate against everything around it like it sat wrong in her eyes. It pulsed slowly, completely out of rhythm with anything else around it, any other pulse she had ever seen. She stepped over toward it, glowered down at it, then cleared her throat.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to simply blink out of existence?”

The object didn’t respond, either by moving or by ceasing to exist. After a moment, she sighed and picked it up.

It was heavier and lighter than she’d thought at the same time. Too light to be stone, too heavy to be a blossom. The slow steady pulse spoke of hibernation, deep sleep.

“An egg?” She asked aloud.

She extended a finger and poked it intangibly through the membrane of the surface. It was hard and scale-like, but under pressure became almost paper-soft and thin. Her ghostly digit probed the inside, feeling a small cluster of cells which were replicating. Not quickly, not into anything she recognized, but replicating. She drew her finger back, leaving the egg unscathed and hefting it amusedly.

Her eyes narrowed, she watched the egg swell and then hatch in her hand, crumbling open to reveal and empty interior. The fragments of shell slowly peeled away from the empty core, rotting in her hand and falling to the ground. She blinked and the apparition disappeared.

“But not fertilized, not properly. I suppose you need something foreign?”

She bent and plucked a blade of grass, pushing it into the membrane. It slid in until it had vanished completely, then reammerged a moment later. The pulse of the egg skipped a beat, it hadn’t liked that.

“Somebody foreign, then.” She smirked.

She had started reaching to her head to pluck a hair and try the same thing, but after a moment she brought the egg to her face and pressed her lips against it. When she pulled it away, it seemed to almost shiver. The cells inside began to replicate faster, taking in new orders.

“And here I thought there would be nothing more boring than tending to my garden.”

A moment later, a wreath of flame swallowed her and her newfound curiosity. Shortly after, birds began to chirp again nearby.