In the early morning hours of a Sunday, the last living Iceborn resided high within her grand fortress. Tucked into a study that often took up much of her free time, albeit willingly. One had to always find something to do in order to pass the flow of time. Otherwise? Madness makes a hasty friend of those that spend far too long in their own thoughts. She had her hobbies. Writing, the occasional piece of poetry no soul could ever be allowed to read, even dabbling with her gifts to create picturesque sculptures and works of art that only she could cherish.

The room was in the corner bastion overlooking the varying baileys and keeps in the lower ends of the citadel. Arched, ceiling-high windows allowed sight over the rest of her domain. It sat adjacent to her grand library, where the real histories of the Freljord were kept sealed away from prying and curious eyes. If anyone were to get ahold of those documents, it would unravel hundreds of years of painstaking work. A disaster. She sat at a grand oaken desk weathered from use, dressed in simple black robes often worn to bed. Her servants would ponder and fuss over their queen spending so much time in isolation; but it was necessary.


She looked exhausted. Resting a palm against her cheek as iridescent eyes lazily glanced over her work, a yawn stifled with said palm before she carried on; putting quill to parchment to continue. A recounting of forgotten histories finally put to something other than her memory.


“The story of the Freljord is a tale that had been told again, and again through the ages to countless scholars and children. Hero and villain alike have their stories etched into the annals of northern lore. Braum and the Tomb of the Troll Boy, a heartwarming tale of how Braun bore through the mountain itself to save the boy, emerging on the other side to take the great door as his trophy. The great and tragic hunts of yesteryear, even the odd tale of the noble warrior rescuing his daughters from a roving dragon. Many were meant to be told around the fire to the smiles of children and adults alike.

Others? Other stories were meant to threaten those very same children into eating their vegetables, going to sleep at a decent hour, or excerpts from their passages being repurposed as the odd curse word. The terrifying accounts of the Ice Witch. A roving, legendary evil throughout the north that had swept up entire villages, leaving death and destruction for whomever crossed her. No mercy, no survivors. Those that claimed they saw her and lived to tell the tale were psychologically disturbed for the rest of their days, claiming the permanent frostbite afflicting their bodies to be the result of her work.

The tales of Braum and the other heroes of lore, they had all been rewritten over the centuries by the only Iceborn left alive after the War of the Three Sisters. The Watchers that had come a thousand years prior had come to share their magic, gave us incredible gifts and made us immortal. As everlasting as the glacial mountains themselves. The Iceborn set themselves on empire building. Civilization was carved across the desolate north, with the gifts of the watchers sown across the wastes where nothing but ice and rock had existed before. The tribes united under a single banner for a simple price: Loyalty. It was something almost everyone of importance gave freely. They were happy to support their overlords as it maintained peace and quashed the tribal conflicts that had torn the land asunder since the first snows began to fall.

The Iceborn set about building their empire, constructing the vast networks of roads and fortresses across the barren tundra, glacial fjords and hilly lowlands; yet it was not meant to be. Loyalty was everything to many, but some were still discontent. They wished to make their own decisions, their Watcher overlords be damned. Independence? Freedom of choice? It did not matter how many Iceborn died to achieve that goal, somehow it was worth it to Avarosa and Serylda. The consequences of their independence lead to the ceaseless infighting that plagued their descendants to the present day.”



“Everybody appreciates a good story, do they not?”

Lissandra stopped dead, dropping her quill across the finished lines of text. What, or whom was that? The voice was soft and distinctly feminine. She had already caved to the worries of her servants and eaten something resembling a proper meal hours earlier, but there was no knock at her door, nor any secret entrances to the room that she was aware of.The Witch pulled her gaze from her written musings, glaring towards the entrance to her study. A heavy door of wood and iron with the lock fused over with black ice. There was annoyance crossing her features.

“I do not appreciate having practical jokes played upon me, you should know the consequences for trespassing in my personal chambers.” She spoke to no one in particular, bellowing into the empty room.

It was no simple threat, but a promise of a swift and violent death for the intruder; yet no one came forward. It was puzzling to her. The only sound was the gentle whistling of the wind outside of her windows. This was getting annoying. Lissandra remained with her back to her work, leering at every corner of the room to ensure she was fully and truly alone. Her mass of snow white hair clung to her ankles, drifting to and fro as scanned.

“You look in the wrong place.”

The chair she rested in was shoved back, the Iceborn Queen shooting to her feet with a second to spare. A shard of ice materialized within her fingertips, ready to be flung at whomever dared to trespass within her most private domain. Behind her, a woman of smaller stature with shoulder length blonde hair sat with her legs crossed in tattered robes. A beaming and beautiful smile resting upon paled lips, curling from ear to ear. She could not have been older than twenty seven or twenty eight at best. Her eyes had lengthy scars across them, rendering her blind; the result of an Ursine’s claw during teenaged years. Lissandra turned on the heels of her feet, leveling a furious glare at her intruder. The Witch was ready to thrust that shard and impale her into the stone wall, only for that to effortless tumblr from her hand and shatter upon the floor.

By the Watchers, it was her.

“You should be dead.” Lissandra mumbled between grit teeth as she rolled her shoulders.

“And yet here I sit.”

“When your body could serve me no longer, I had to cast it aside in order to take another. Every matron, every warlord. I killed them in order to take the place of their successor. It does not explain why you have /dared/ to manifest yourself before me--”

“Our body.” she interrupted. “I am you as much, if not more than you are me. Do you think those miraculous acts of kindness you never thought yourself capable of were by accident? I never left, and you could never bury me away forever. If you do not hear me out, by the will of the gods that you fervently worship I will drive you to insanity.”


Lissandra said nothing, her fingertips fidgeted and bent, nails clicking into one another as she stood perfectly still. The Witch had been alive long enough to know when someone was trying to bluff her, this was no trick. She reached up to rub her eyes, blinking those scarred, empty hues again and again; still ‘she’ sat in front of her.

“Go on.” she murred, hands falling to the side.

The woman reached to bundle messy bangs of that wheat-coloured hair behind her head, arching her legs to ease to her feet. “I stayed with you through it all. As much as you would like to believe that the Watchers gifts destroyed what made you human, you may as well quash that fantasy right now. I grew tired of watching you butcher for sport, terrorize and destroy. Thus, I have done what I can to make my presence known.”

“What did you d--” again she was cut off.

“I helped you remember. Passively, slowly. Over time I regrew your conscience, allowed the odd emotion to make itself known. Your fanaticism was driving you somewhere I did not want you to go. If you forget the people, your tribe, the peace we once achieved. You were no better than the tribal leaders killing for fun. Look at the Avarosa, the Winter’s Claw. Ashe seeks to unite them with diplomacy, yet you are an abomination. If only she could see things the way you did. Sejuani is a mad dog that deserves to be put down, she is the kind of warlord you butchered in the name of the Watchers to secure our future all those years ago.”

The Iceborn Witch said nothing. She could not believe what she was hearing, nor witnessing. A manifestation of spirit was something she had read of, the runemages of old going mad with power being settled by meditation and self-recollection. A reshuffling of the deck some could call it. Her hands continued to fidget and toy with one another, leaving the tips of those nails to unwittingly dig into the palms of each hand.

“The Watchers will return someday, but if they do not, fulfill your purpose. You want peace in the Freljord, just like you always did. Of all the things you bother to remember, remember that. For me, for us. Dispatch the wild dog and find a way - with honesty, or your brand of magic - to find Avarosa’s descendant the peace she wants. Even if you are forced to continue living your lie, do what you have always done. Manipulate. It is what you are good at. If you are the last Iceborn, let it fall by the wayside. Create the world we wanted regardless of the consequences to yourself or the web you have woven over the centuries. To fight the world again would be your death, this is something you must outgrow if you are to survive. Do right by my memory, for us and for your people. They are your people now.”

Lissandra continued to say nothing up until them. She looked like she had been slugged in the stomach with Poppy’s hammer, lips twisted into a grimace loaded with utter upset and sorrow. The woman did not know what to do with herself, what to say. She was humbled, sitting back in school as her existence was ripped apart and rebuilt before her very eyes. Her bangs drifted into her eyes, a hushed sniffle leaving her. A hand came up to wipe at the corners of those scarred, iridescent hues. She was a scared little girl then, as distraught, even sad as she could ever remember being. The dread Ice Witch reduced to a moment of vulnerable emotion.

“Very- very well,” she began, a hint of a stammer in her tone. “I will find a way to carry on, as I always have. I will- continue in the way I have these past years. It has been--difficult, to turn around and become someone else. You tend to pile up a list of regrets over the years, the little voices that chastise you for treating someone poorly, or outright killing them for their insolence. Though that was you at work, wasn’t it---”

She looked up expecting to see the blonde standing before her looking expectant and proud of her accomplishments, but there was nothing. An empty seat with no sign anyone had been there.

Gone.

Lissandra closed the distance between herself and that weathered, wooden chair. Panicked, she reached to haul the ancient furniture into the air with little effort. Examining it, breathlessly scanning over it with intense worry in her eyes. Whatever had happened, it must have been for a reason. There was a reason for everything, nothing was coincidence. Ever.

Nothing.

The stories telling of time immemorial could wait, she felt a wave of exhaustion wash over her as she held that chair against her side. She started towards the door locking her within the study, breaking the ice molded over the lock with a wave of her hand. Pushing the door open with her shoulder, hollow eyes took the time to look over the chair still clutched within her hand; she had dragged it with her unknowingly. A glance was taken around vacant hall lit by blue torchlight. With the coast clear, her free hand came up to wipe at the corners of her eyes once more-- as the Ice Witch trudged towards her bedchamber while dragging that ancient chair at her heels.