Ascent 9.12

2005, October 31: Phoenix, AZ, USA

I looked around with a carefree grin. “Man, I haven’t been here in so long. I guess I'm dreaming then.”

“You are. Welcome back, Turtle,” Farya said as she shimmered into existence before me. Wolyo circled his partner, an ever-present plume of eldritch smoke and menacing fangs.

“‘Welcome back?’ This is my own soul. Strictly speaking, is it even possible for me to ever leave?”

“We reside here, so whose is it really? Is this not so? Humans who reside in a place can claim it as their own and it is rightfully theirs.”

“Squatting. What you're talking about is called squatting. It's usually illegal.”

“Hmph, human morals are beneath us,” Farya sniffed dismissively, an ironically human gesture.

“Your sense of humor can use more work.”

“My sense of humor is perfect, a constant through the ages.”

“The word you're looking for is ‘dated,’” I replied dryly.

I smiled. I liked to think that beneath her mask, she was also smiling. This was what the Kindred had desired when linking their souls to me, a deeper connection to the living, an end to their loneliness.

I looked to the temple and the World Rune enshrined within. It was as I remembered it. The rune sat atop a simple altar, a constellation formed by three brilliant novas surrounded by nine lesser stars, the Keystones and their lesser runes.

I’d acquired two of those Keystones already: Glacial Augment and Unsealed Spellbook. The former granted me my affinity for True Ice. It was what allowed me to forge my eyes and armor, contract with a shade of the Cryophoenix, and force Leviathan into a stalemate.

The second expanded my magical arsenal with disciplines and spell matrices from all across Runeterra's long history. I used it to augment my already fluid combat style, provide enchanted rings for my loved ones, and form the hextech mech that would be the lynchpin against Behemoth.

I'd come far since Unsealed Spellbook. I'd faced two endbringers and played a part in one's death. I'd greatly expanded the Worldstone Network. I'd made strides in hextech, with Hextech: Gamera, Tibbers, and other related weapons. I'd honed my budding divinity and greatly expanded Babylon for mass production.

Now, it was time to claim the third. This was it, the very last node within Inspiration. Soon, the entirety of the World Rune would be mine.

Slowly, I stepped forward, towards the climax I’d been building toward ever since I arrived on Earth-Bet. I felt an electric shiver crawl down my spine. Each step seemed to carry an indescribable weight, the gravitas of what I was about to do.

Each Keystone had been a game changer, a milestone in my development that shot me forward by leaps and bounds. A single one would have made anyone a top-tier cape in its own right.

So what could I do with the full World Rune?

What couldn’t I do?

My heart hammered in my ears. My hand trembled with nervous energy as I reached for the last Keystone.

Just as my fingers touched upon the unkindled star, a subtle tremor shook the altar. A brilliant flame of mana erupted from the World Rune like a solar flare and I felt my soul burn.

I sank deep into a dream within dreams. I became a passenger in my own soul as eternity passed in an instant and time lost all meaning.

The grand history of Runeterra played out before me. From the beginning to the end, I bore witness through the lens of Inspiration.

I saw the celestials speak into the void at the dawn of creation. They molded reality into being, condensing their language into five runes of godly power.

Reality was molded with Domination in mind. With exacting Precision. With unbreakable Resolve. With an artistry that would come to be called Sorcery. And, perhaps most of all, with Inspiration that captured the potential of all that Runeterra could one day become.

I saw the birth of the eldest of races. The spirit gods, the ten demons, the first yordles, the Kindred, the first men, and the men who formed the first contracts with the most ancient of Aspects. I saw as the Arbiter of the Stars, a golem of impossible complexity and power, took up his post at the peak of Targon, awaiting the wise, brave, and foolish in turn.

I watched as Ornn crafted the first hammer. I watched as Anivia burned down Ornn’s first home, completely on accident. Much later, Ornn forged the bridge over the Howling Abyss, trapping the Watchers. I also saw Lissandra’s folly, and her subsequent downfall. I watched as the Three Sisters grew, and grew apart. 

I mourned as the Titan War began over Ionia. The first titans descended from beyond the stars and the vastayashai’rei, the progenitors of the many vastaya clans, fought them to mutual extinction. Countless legends were carved in blood, only to fade away in the sands of time. Their only lasting legacy was the veil between mortal and spirit realms, woven and frayed during this time.

Everything, from the earliest of civilizations to the Rune Wars and beyond, was laid bare before me. Figures who defined Runeterra’s history, some known even in the modern age, and even more forgotten, flashed in my mind. Their story was, in effect, the story of the world, and the story of the world was recorded with the World Runes.

It was as if every inspired decision filled my head. Some were momentous. Tyrus was inspired to reach out and grasp the World Runes for himself, and paid the ultimate price. Swain was inspired to make a deal with a demon, giving up his arm and ascending as the Grand General of Noxus. The mages of Icathia were inspired to release the Void into the world, just as Xerath was inspired to betray Shurima and his dearly beloved friend.

I witnessed a billion tragedies spread across millennia. It was as though every life, every soul, was but a reflection, just one possible story that could be told via some combination of these five runes.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. There was joy and silliness as well. There was that time when Rumble, in a bit of inspired madness, wrote a string of Ionian poetry in an attempt to woo Tristana. He wasn’t successful in winning her heart, but he did make her smile, and that had him grinning like a loon for weeks.

There was the hope Seraphine inspired in others. She spent countless hours composing each song, each word carefully chosen to carry the heartfelt wish of a painfully naive girl. And her songs reached the people, slowly at first, until not even the most skeptical of Zaunites could deny her genuine goodwill.

I laughed as Ashe fled for her life, bitter tears stinging her face. Her own clansmen chased her with drawn weapons, only to lose her in the blizzard. I knew how this tale would end.

It was a spirit hawk who found her, a bird of divine providence who sought her out at Anivia’s bidding. The hawk led the would-be warmother to a grave, ancient beyond compare. And there, she found her ancestor’s bow. It was as close to Excalibur as the Freljord had. She took it up, and with it, proved her mettle as Iceborn.

That hawk inspired her to lead her people, not towards more bloodshed, but towards the dream of a unified Freljord. No longer a warmother, but a queen in truth, chasing after a childhood fantasy. Perhaps, with enough strength of will, charisma, and a bit of luck, she’d make this bit of inspiration a reality.

Big and small, tragic and glorious. Every spell, every invention, every dream and ambition, every line of poetry and prose. All the things that were inspired, I bore witness as the World Rune merged itself fully with my soul.

Until finally, I saw Ryze. The Rune Mage, the great master of spells so esoteric that he achieved immortality. Born a man, yet mightier than Aspects. This was the student of Tyrus, perhaps the one man worthy of wielding these runes.

He saw his master, his father, take on the power of the World Runes. He saw Khom, his home, burn from his father’s hubris. And he swore to keep Runeterra safe from the ambitions of the foolhardy, dedicating his immortal life to protecting these runes, and the world in turn.

In one timeline, one I’d read about on card arts and web stories, he would have hidden the World Runes somewhere in a sea of petricite trees taller than skyscrapers. He’d remove them only once that I could recall. It was to stop Xolaani, the greatest of Darkin, and that, only after even the Aspect of Justice died by her hand and her star fell to the earth.

But this wasn’t Ryze from my memories. This was the history recorded within the World Rune, a different timeline altogether. And in this one, Ryze was inspired to make a different choice.

He decided that no one, not even him, was fit to wield the power of the World Runes. He decided that nowhere, not even a sea of magic-eating trees, was safe. And, after so many centuries of standing vigil, he decided that his watch was at an end.

With no one and nowhere worthy of housing such relics, he stood atop the Howling Abyss, and let go.

The World Runes fell into the darkness. They fell beyond even the prison that held the Watchers and into the Space Between Worlds. Like this, they were forever beyond the grasp of any on Runeterra, or so Ryze thought.

It was here that I lost sight of the other four. For it was here that Inspiration found a host. It latched on to a wandering soul, me, and that force propelled us both elsewhere. That was how I ended up regaining consciousness in the waters around Busan, how the original Yusung Kim died.

I took a deep breath as I returned to myself. The experience left me feeling like a rubber band that had been stretched one too many times.

First Strike, the final Keystone, was great. It was a causality-warping guarantee that so long as I was aware of a conflict and willing to take initiative, my blow would land first. It wasn’t an elemental affinity like Glacial Augment. Nor was it a repository of foundational spells like Unsealed Spellbook.

No, this was pure, unadulterated aggression. It made no guarantees about whether I would survive the counterattack. Nor did it empower my strike, as it had in the game I remembered. All it did was guarantee that I’d be faster. No matter what, the First Strike was mine.

It would have been game-changing under any other circumstance. Distorting causality, no matter how minor, was a big deal, especially for such a crucial moment as the opening second of a conflict. But even a Keystone was overshadowed completely by the weight of the revelations I’d seen.

Slowly, I looked around. The World Rune was still here, but the not-space in my soul was completely wrecked. The temple, built up over time as I ignited each lesser rune, was little more than a dilapidated mess. Deep cracks ran along the walls and columns. The nine censers that once held brightly dancing flames were nought but crumpled bronze now.

The altar that held Inspiration was in a similar state of ruin. Its surface was cracked and a good portion of it had melted into slag. Turned out, I couldn’t fully assimilate the equivalent of an Infinity Stone without consequences.

But the biggest change was the Kindred.

“You look… different…” I began. My voice came out in a hoarse croak.

Farya shrugged her furred shoulders. “We are spirit gods. We are as you see us. Or rather, we are tied to your existence, and in turn, how you perceive yourself.”

I processed that, and tried to figure out why she looked more… human… now.

For starters, she had horns now. They grew in long and thick, curling around a head of blue locks to frame her mask like a regal crown. Female sheep, ewes, didn’t have those, but then again, Farya was an ewe like Lulu was a child. Superficial similarities aside, conflating the two could be a fatal mistake.

Then there was the rest of her outfit. Her mask was a pristine white now, more akin to porcelain than the gnarled wood it had been before. She also wore clothes, a set of pink, ocean-blue, and white robes that looked vaguely Asian. Kimono? Hanbok? Something Thai maybe? Or perhaps a combination of all these elements, just as Ionians were.

Her white fur was mostly gone, with only a hood and the hems of her wrists lined in it. Her hands were distinctly human now, covered by a pair of gloves that had no index finger or thumb for better dexterity.

Behind her, Wolyo had been equally changed. He had no mask now, not unless you considered violet facepaint to count. His fur rippled in shades of bone-white, with violet designs that curled around his head. He was more corporeal now. He gazed at us with burning, orange eyes, languid grin hiding lethal finality.

The Eternal Hunters had always possessed a wild, feral aura about them. They’d always reminded me of something Celtic or druidic, an ominous “lord of the forest” vibe. Theirs was an old magic shaped by Runeterra’s history.

Though I knew what they, what we were, they almost seemed… civilized… like this. Or perhaps “playful” was a more appropriate word.

“Spirit Blossom,” I whispered. Like Hextech, it was the name of a line of skins back in my old life, and also the name of a grand festival in Ionia which celebrated the living and the dead. “You look like the Spirit Blossom skins I remember. Maybe the cut of your dress is a little different, but… why…? Have you always been able to change?”

“We are Death,” Farya began.

“You yet live,” Wolyo finished for her.

“The Spirit Blossom Festival marks a time when the boundary between the living and the dead is thinnest,” I spoke, reciting something I’d read long ago. The connections were obvious. “You. Me. The living and the dead. We’re one… But why now? Why not when I took on the Mask for the first time?”

The Kindred were silent. Slowly, purposefully, Lamb strolled over to a nearby temple wall. She ran her fingertip gently against its face. To my surprise, the already dilapidated wall crumbled beneath her finger as if it had been made of loose chalk. 

“Wait, wait. Oi! What are you doing to someone else’s soul?” I cried in alarm.

“Is it your soul? How are you speaking to us independent of your soul?” she asked, head tilted slightly in askance. “What is this place, Yusung? And why is it only now that you have fully subsumed the World Rune that it has begun to crumble?”

“This place is my mindscape. It’s a reflection of my soul, a metaphysical plane in which my consciousness takes physical form.”

“That is true. Then what is this temple? This altar? Do you worship the World Rune? Or perhaps the idea of Inspiration?”

“No, I… I was Christian in my past life. It was where I got the idea to gather holy water when I first started out. But now… I don’t know that I worship anything,” I confessed. The words made me feel self-conscious, though I wasn’t sure I could explain why I felt that way.

She shrugged uncaringly. “So if you do not worship the World Rune, why is it a temple that sits at the center of your soul?”

“I… I don’t know. I don’t know what it represents. Everything else here has been fairly straightforward.”

“Why don’t you know?”

I snorted in annoyance. “If you know the answer, would you mind telling me? This whole ‘answering questions with more questions’ thing is getting old.”

“Humor me, little Turtle. Consider the question.”

I frowned. Why didn’t I know?

A temple. An altar. If I truly held the World Rune so highly, and I was a Christian in my past life, then shouldn’t this place look more like the inside of a church? I’d certainly been in enough of them to know what they looked like.

For that matter, this was a reflection of my soul. Everything here was a part of me, Kindred included. Theoretically, if this was my soul, everything should be intuitively comprehensible to me, at least inasmuch as I wasn’t in denial about some crucial aspect of myself.

I wasn’t. I was a deeply traumatized man in a teenage body who was terrified of the ocean. I fell in love with a Latina villainess, executed her and her entire crew, and then joined a global conspiracy. My best friend was the scariest thinker in the world, who undoubtedly social-fu’d her way into my good graces to ease her Path. I knowingly enabled her questionable decisions, all for the sake of preserving more lives.

I was a hero, but I’d done plenty of ugly things as well. I accepted this. Every part of it was me, just as much as the part that liked to sit down for dinner with mom and read Riley bedtime stories. I was a hero, a killer, a dutiful son, a doting big brother, and a nascent spirit god.

I took great pride in understanding my own character. I wasn’t the sort to lie to myself. And if that was true, then…

“The temple isn’t a part of me,” I said quietly. It was the only conclusion I could come to. “Is it?”

“Yes. No. It is tied closely to you, enough to merit a presence here, but it is not of you,” she replied.

“How? I received Anivia’s blessing, but that came as an extension of Glacial Augment. The only other thing I took on was the Mask and this temple was here before that.”

“Perhaps it was here from the beginning. You were not always the one who inhabited this body.”

“I mean, sure, but this body was eight when I arrived, barely more than a toddler. It’s not like the Yusung before me performed a magical ritual.” I paused. There was one possibility. “Is… Is the temple a manifestation of my Shard?”

“I have no idea. I have had no reason to learn about this world’s workings.”

It wasn’t impossible. Rebecca and Eugene mentioned it a while back when I briefed them on Lulu’s presence. I had a corona, an inactive one.

Or so I’d thought. I’d thought that I hadn’t met whatever arbitrary criteria my Shard was looking for in a trigger. I put the topic aside because it didn’t really matter. The World Rune was so much more powerful and versatile than anything a Shard could give.

But what if my corona was only inactive in the conventional sense? What if there was more beneath the surface? It would seem dormant because my Shard had no external expression of parahuman powers.

I’d had plenty of chances to manifest a power: Busan, when I lost my father and a snapped power line ripped through my eyes. The Red Sands Incident. My duel with the Simurgh in which I sacrificed myself to cast Lamb’s Respite, buying Penelope the brief reprieve needed to survive Warptek’s dimension distortion grenade.

I’d been powerless. I’d been petrified with fear, both for myself and on behalf of those precious to me. I’d believed I was in love, only to shoot that woman. If anything, the fact that I’d yet to trigger like a normal parahuman should have been a glaring clue.

Then there was the other anomaly, the World Rune itself. The visions I just saw made one thing clear: Most people didn’t survive touching a World Rune. That wasn’t just a general “absolute power corrupts absolutely” kind of thing, either.

To touch a World Rune was to imbue a fragment of its infinite mana. Not even Tyrus, Ryze’s master and a legendary mage in his own right, was an exception. The man touched one for a few seconds and got himself dusted out of existence as if he’d started beef with Thanos. Not to mention the fallout that destroyed Khom.

Ryze had every reason to be paranoid. Even he avoided touching one directly if he could help it. So why me? Why was I the exception?

After all, hadn’t I housed Inspiration within my very soul for years now? Hadn’t I just done something that not even Ryze had by merging with it completely?

What made me so special? My original world didn’t even have magic. The more I thought about it, the more I began to connect the dots.

The answer was that I wasn’t special. I wasn’t a miraculous magic talent. My soul may have fluked its way through the Space Between Worlds, but coming into direct contact with Inspiration should not have been my salvation, quite the opposite.

But what if I hadn’t been the only thing to touch it? I’d long hypothesized that my soul was drawn to this body specifically because this body was effectively me, simply an alternate version of me. That draw would only have been possible if the original Yusung died, his young soul having left this body.

And what was that moment of death but a moment of supreme crisis? It was a trigger, not for me perhaps, but for him. If the soul left the body, what was the point of a trigger event?

Logic said the Shard would abandon a dead body, but perhaps not? Not right away, not when it had no way of knowing the soul had vacated.

So the Shard kept the connection open. The body had yet to expire, even if no one was in the driver seat anymore. When my soul occupied this body for the first time, I suspected the Shard had also reached out. Certainly not for the World Rune, but maybe for anything at all that might keep this body going.

It saw something alien, a source of energy completely foreign to its database. So, it did what all Shards did: It gathered data. It reached out and took the physical shell of the World Rune, the crystal prison Ryze had for it, into itself.

Were Shards alive? Strictly speaking, I knew they were, but not in the same way humans were alive. Perhaps that inability to identify or manipulate mana kept it from committing suicide via mana overload as Tyrus had.

So if a Shard acquired a foreign object that released an indeterminable energy, what would it do?

Well, it’d probably run tests. And the main way Shards did that was to outsource the thinking to a lesser species. In this case, I was pretty sure the Shard drip-fed me minute trickles of the World Rune so it could observe the effects of mana on an expendable lifeform.

If this was what really happened, then it must have been as surprised as Shards could get when I recognized Inspiration. Maybe the World Rune presented me with the lesser runes specifically in a manner that was familiar to me. Maybe the Shard saw me adapt and attempted to assimilate the rune in its own way, hastening its degradation.

Or, I was completely wrong. None of this happened. The Shard met the World Rune and was immediately subsumed by Inspiration. Some nascent consciousness within the World Rune found a way to fuse with a host without the host dying and I was the result.

I was shooting from the hip here. To be honest, I didn’t even know if this temple and altar were in fact the metaphysical representation of the Shard. All I knew was that this thing that housed the World Rune had finally crumbled, its purpose fulfilled.

Was it the Kindred’s influence? Had Death come for my Shard? Or had the Shard finally degraded after years of contact with Inspiration?

I didn’t know. At this point, it’d be impossible to find out. I looked into Farya’s mask, but it was as expressionless as ever.

Either way, I supposed the truth didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was that I now fully possessed the World Rune. Truthfully, there wasn’t much distinction between the rune and my soul.

As I came to that realization, the last of the altar crumbled. The construct, three Keystones orbited by a ring of nine lesser nodes, began to fade. Its place as a distinct existence separate from me was no longer necessary.

I looked over the ruins one last time, my partners beside me. “This place, whatever it was, acted as the filter that allowed me to slowly process the World Rune in full. I think it deserves a name, don’t you?”

“We care not,” Wolyo growled.

“What will you call it? Should you not have named it while it was standing?” Farya asked curiously.

“I should have,” I chuckled. “Better late than never, right?”

“It must be a human thing.”

“Maybe.”

“Very well, Turtle. Bestow a name upon this place, the ruined altar of your ascension.”

“It’s nothing so melodramatic, Farya. It was a slow rise, so I think I’ll call it… Gradient.”

Author’s Note

This officially concludes Arc 9: Ascent. I finally got to loredump this in the main story.

Congrats to that one dude who pointed out that Andy shouldn’t even be able to touch a World Rune without imploding. And that other dude who kept asking if Andy had a Shard. I don’t even know if they’re reading this now, because that was literally years ago, but here is the premise I’ve been workshopping since the very first chapter.

Does it change anything? No, not really, but it does feel really satisfying to get to this point. If Gradient sounds familiar, that’s because I actually said this way back when, in the Inspired Inventor series of omakes.

Also, introducing Spirit Blossom Kindred!

That’s another thing I’ve been hinting at. The contract is a two-way street. Andy became more like Death. Death became more like Andy.

The real OTP shall be Andy and Farya. Which I guess makes him a sheepfucker. And therefore qualified for Scottish citizenship. That’s how it works, right?

Animal Fact: Horseshoe crab blood is one of the most valuable organic substances in the world. A single quart of it can cost $15,000 or more.

This is because the blood contains Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL), a substance used to test for endotoxins in the pharmaceutical industry. There is no synthetic alternative and horseshoe crabs only emerge annually during their mating season (usually May or June).

Thank you for reading. To reach a wider audience, and because I enjoy a more forum-like setup to facilitate discussion, I like to crosspost to a wide variety of websites. If you’re also like me, you can find my works on

Space Battles: https://forums.spacebattles.com/members/fabled-webs.514019/ 

Questionable Questing: https://questionablequesting.com/members/fabled-webs.29875/