Volume 1: Earth Arc
Chapter 3: The Dust of Icathia
Sand.
That was the first sensation that registered on his tongue.
Dry, coarse, and feeling like pulverized glass as he forced himself to swallow.
Shu forced his eyelids open.
The world spun violently.
He was no longer in his cramped, humid bedroom.
The mocking red glow of his broken monitor was gone.
Instead, a ceiling woven from rough, faded fabric and heavy animal hides stretched above him, swaying gently against a hot, oppressive night wind.
He tried to push himself up.
His brain sent the motor signals to his arms, fully expecting to lift a seventy-kilogram adult frame.
What happened next was a moment of total, paralyzing disorientation.
His center of gravity was entirely wrong.
His arms were too short.
His muscles failed to respond with the explosive strength he anticipated.
His body pitched sideways, collapsing face-first onto a hard, dust-caked woven mat.
“Ugh…” The sound that escaped his throat made Shu’s blood run cold.
It wasn’t the raspy, caffeine-ruined baritone of a twenty-two-year-old man.
It was a thin, reedy whimper.
The fragile, pathetic voice of a child.
Panic seized his chest.
His tiny heart hammered at an erratic, terrifying pace, pumping blood against his temples until they throbbed in rhythm.
He brought both hands in front of his face.
Under the dim, flickering light of a distant campfire bleeding through the tent flaps, he saw them.
Two tiny hands.
The skin wasn’t the pale, sickly white of a shut-in; it was deeply tanned, baked by an unfamiliar sun, caked with clay dust, and completely devoid of any electrical burn scars.
What is happening?
A hallucination?
A coma from the electrocution?
His breathing hitched.
He frantically gasped for air, but his small lungs were completely unaccustomed to the sharp, arid particles of the desert wind.
He choked.
A violent cough tore through his throat, causing his small body to curl into a painful spasm on the mat.
The sharp sting in his chest was too visceral, too absolute, shattering any logical theory of a dream his mind desperately tried to construct.
Through the agonizing fit of coughing, the soft crunch of small footsteps approached.
The tent flap was pushed aside, letting in a draft of cooler night air alongside the silhouette of a young girl.
She looked to be about his age, perhaps five or six.
Straight, unruly black hair framed a round face smudged with dirt.
But it was her eyes that made Shu freeze.
They possessed an unusual depth, reflecting the firelight with an intense, innocent curiosity mixed with genuine concern.
The girl knelt beside him, clutching a waterskin made from a goat’s stomach.
Her rough, tiny hands pushed the wooden spout toward Shu’s cracked lips.
“Drink,” she said.
Another cosmic anomaly occurred: Shu understood her perfectly.
The words weren’t spoken in his native tongue, but rather a harsh, ancient dialect full of sharp consonants and guttural hisses.
Yet, his brain translated it flawlessly, as if he had spoken it his entire life.
Driven by a burning, primal thirst, Shu’s survival instincts took over.
He grabbed the leather skin with trembling hands and gulped the water down.
It tasted bitter, laced with copper and earth, but at that moment, it was divine nectar extinguishing the fire in his throat.
He coughed weakly as he pulled away, wiping his chin with the back of his tiny hand.
“You had another nightmare, Shu?” the girl asked.
Her voice was plain and unfiltered, her small hand reaching out to brush the dust from his shoulder.
“You were screaming really loud.”
Shu stared at her.
That name.
She called him Shu.
He had an existence here.
An established identity, a body with its own history, now violently hijacked by the consciousness of a man from another dimension.
“Where…” Shu’s voice trembled, weak and raspy.
He forced his unfamiliar tongue to form the syllables of this alien dialect.
“Where are we?”
The little girl tilted her head, her brow furrowing in confusion.
She let out a small, clear laugh that felt painfully out of place in the harsh night.
“You really aren’t fully awake, are you?
We’re home.
In the valley,” she answered, pointing a small finger toward the dark, rocky expanse outside the tent.
“On the outskirts of Icathia.”
Shu’s world stopped spinning.
It simply shattered.
The word hit him like a physical blow.
Icathia.
His blood turned to ice.
As a player who had spent thousands of hours absorbing the lore of League of Legends, he knew exactly what that name meant.
Icathia was not a mere village.
It was a tombstone.
It was the absolute ground zero of the greatest cataclysm in Runeterra’s history.
The place where the fabric of reality would tear open, bleeding the horrors of the Void into the mortal realm.
“Y-you…” Shu stared at the girl, his heart beating so erratically his chest ached.
“What is your name?”
The girl pouted, lightly punching his weak arm as if he were playing a dumb joke.
“Are you stupid or something?
It’s me.
Kaisa.”
Kai’Sa.
The Daughter of the Void.
The girl who was destined to be trapped in the subterranean abyss, surviving only by consuming monsters and fusing a living, parasitic carapace to her own flesh.
Shu looked down at his own trembling hands, and then back at the innocent, smiling face of little Kai’Sa.
The temporal puzzle pieced itself together in his mind with ruthless clarity.
If Kai’Sa was only about five years old…
that meant the cataclysm hadn’t happened yet.
The massive earthquake that would swallow their entire village into the belly of the Void was still waiting in the future.
Roughly two years from now.
He hadn’t been sent to a fantasy world to be a celebrated hero.
He had been dropped directly into death’s waiting room, trapped in the body of a toddler who didn’t even possess the strength to lift a wooden sword.
The night wind of Icathia howled again, sweeping into the tent.
This time, Shu felt more than just the desert heat.
Deep beneath the hardened earth under his bare feet, he felt a faint, unnatural vibration.
A static hum that scraped against his sanity, identical to the one he had heard in the cosmic tunnel.
They were being watched from below.
And the watchers were starving.