Azra'il - POV
Mahr'Lokk's cabin was a reflection of his personality: spacious, functional, and full of the echoes of a brutal life. Large nautical charts covered one wall, dotted with annotations and routes drawn with a steady hand. On a shelf, there were strange artefacts: a bronze compass that didn't seem to point north, the fossilised jawbone of some terrifying sea creature with teeth the size of my hand, white and serrated. A single large stern-window revealed the foamy wake the ship left behind on the dark sea.
The captain was standing, his greatcoat off, revealing the true bulk of his shoulders and arms. He gestured us to the table, where three places were already set. The smell was of roasted fish and unfamiliar spices.
"Be seated, please," he said, his voice still that resonant gravel. He did not sit until we were both settled. A show of politeness that contrasted absurdly with the leviathan's teeth on the shelf.
Supper began in a cautious silence. The food was simple but delicious. Morgana, as was her way, initiated the conversation, not with direct questions, but with observations.
"The name of your ship, Captain," she said, her voice soft. "'The Drowned Moon'. It's a melancholic name for such a sturdy vessel. It brings to mind an image of a light that has been lost in the depths."
Mahr'Lokk stopped eating for a moment. His black eyes fixed on her, and I saw a flash of surprise, perhaps even respect, that she had gone straight to the heart of the matter. "It is a reminder," he said at last. "That even the highest light in the sky can be swallowed by the sea, if it grows careless."
The reply was a poem of contained grief. I felt Morgana's gaze on me, likely expecting me to make my move.
"It is a name that tells a story," I said, choosing my words with care, my tone shifting from formal to that of a genuinely intrigued student. "In our old shop, we saw many people from every corner of the world. I've learned that names, especially those chosen after great pain, are not just words. They are… anchors. Marks on the map of someone's life. Your surname, Sangremar… the ship's name, The Drowned Moon… they seem like pieces of the same tragic story."
He stared at me, his piercing gaze narrowing, perhaps surprised by the analysis coming from someone so young. "You observe a great deal, little one. And you think too much."
"It's my trade," I replied with a small smile. "To study the stories people tell, and the ones they try to hide. And the names tell me that you, sir, have a history with the sea that is deeper than that of a simple merchant captain."
He neither confirmed nor denied it, but a muscle worked in his jaw. The hook was set. Now it was time to pull the line.
"Morgana and I," I continued, widening the focus, "are travellers. Collectors of stories. Our goal is to visit every corner of Runeterra, to understand every culture. We have seen the petricite forests of Demacia, the steppes of the Freljord... the Immortal Bastion of Noxus. But there are places that the maps do not describe well. Places that need to be… felt. Lived."
I paused, setting the stage. "That is why I wished to make a request of you, Captain. As a scholar to an expert…"
"An expert in what, precisely?" he asked, his tone wary, a low growl in his voice.
"In survival," I answered, blunt. "And in Bilgewater."
The name hung in the cabin like gunpowder smoke. The atmosphere did not turn hostile, but it became heavier. "What is there to know about that pit of perdition that is not already screamed from the wanted posters in every civilised port?"
"The posters speak of the monsters," I said, leaning forward slightly. "But the monsters are just the symptom. I am interested in the disease. In the culture that allows them to thrive. I am interested in Nagakabouros, the goddess who preaches that life is motion and that stagnation is death. In the naval engineering born of chaos, fast ships made from wrecks and desperation, that outperform vessels designed in Piltover. I want to understand the culture, not just the crime. We want to see the whole page, not just read the frightening title at the top."
He was silent for a long time, turning the metal cup in his calloused, scarred hand. "You're not the first with this 'academic' curiosity," he said at last. "I've known historians from Piltover, young and bright like yourself, who went to Bilgewater in search of 'knowledge'. They left without their boots, their purses, their research data, and in one particularly unfortunate case, most of their dignity. The place does not care for your noble motives. It just… consumes."
"Which is why we need a guide," I insisted gently. "Not a map. A guide. Someone who knows the tides. Someone who knows which docks to avoid like the plague and which taverns serve a drink that, most of the time, isn't poison."
He let out a rough, bitter laugh. "And you think I am that man? That I would return to that place of ghosts to play tour guide for two… curious ladies, no matter how noble their intentions?"
The game was at a critical point. The door of logic had been closed in my face. My proposal, built on academic curiosity and mutual benefit, was useless. But I had one last card to play, one that was not in my original plan. It was a risky gamble, a stab in the dark based not on his words, but on tiny observations my mind had catalogued since the moment I'd met him.
I watched him. Not the captain. But the man. I saw the almost imperceptible tremor in his massive hand as he poured the water. I noted the perpetual tension in his broad shoulders, a stiffness that came not from muscle, but from a vigilance that never ended. I saw the deep, dark circles under his intelligent eyes, circles that spoke not of long nights of work on deck, but of long nights without sleep, or with a sleep that was worse than being awake.
I remembered the subtle way he would massage his temple when he thought no one was looking, as if trying to silence a persistent headache that came from within. And most importantly, I saw the exhaustion. An exhaustion that went beyond the physical, a weariness of the soul that neither discipline nor the new life he had built could erase.
They were the classic, unmistakable symptoms. I had seen them in soldiers returning from the Eastern Front in one of my worlds, in survivors of magical cataclysms in another. It was the stigma of those who are haunted, not by external ghosts, but by the ghosts that live inside their own heads.
It was time to stop talking about the ship and start talking about the passenger who commanded it.
"Perhaps not," I said, my tone shifting completely, discarding the academic persona and adopting that of… something different. Something closer to when I was an apothecary in Noxus. "Not to be our guide. But perhaps to be our client."
He frowned. "I've heard of your teas," he cut me off, anticipating an offer for energy or clarity. "I need nothing to give me energy or make me tell the truth. I have enough of both, to my regret."
"I know," I replied, holding his gaze, the gamble now cast. "What I offer is not clarity. Not energy. It is the opposite." I let the words hang in the air for a moment, sharp and precise. "I offer silence. For the dark hours in the middle of the watch, when the ship groans and the echoes in your mind become louder than the waves on the sea. I offer a remedy for the nights when one sleeps, but does not rest."
He stared at me, frozen. My words had struck their target with a brutal accuracy. He didn't ask how I knew. A man like him would not ask a question that revealed such vulnerability. Instead, after a long silence, he let out a sigh, a sound that seemed to come from the depths of the ocean itself.
"And what remedy would that be, little one?" he asked, his voice hoarse, a failed attempt to maintain his mockery. "A cure for ghosts? A tea for nightmares?"
He had named it himself.
"Nightmares are echoes, Captain," I said, my voice now softer. "Echoes of past pains. To silence the echo, sometimes, you must understand the source of the sound."
And then, like a dam finally giving way to relentless pressure, he told us.
His voice, at first a hoarse murmur, gained strength as the images that plagued him every night assailed him again, this time in the flickering light of the cabin's lamp. He spoke of his time as Sangremar, the Reaver King of Bilgewater, not with the empty pride of a man recounting past glories, but with the grim weight of an exiled king remembering the kingdom he lost. He spoke of his ship, the Serpent's Tooth, as a man speaks of an amputated limb, a part of himself that was torn away. He spoke of his crew, not as subordinates, but as a pack of brothers, forged in the fire of danger and the salt of the sea.
And he spoke, with a raw pain that decades had failed to polish or smooth, of his son, Azh'Kai.
"Hubris," he snarled, and the word was a self-loathing so deep it was almost palpable in the room. "It's the luxury of fools who forget that the sea is always the master. We thought we were the tide itself. Relentless. Inevitable. And because of that… we grew blind." He looked at his own calloused hands on the table. "We targeted a convoy in the fog, thinking it was Piltovan gold. A mistake."
He let out a bitter, joyless laugh. "It wasn't gold. It was Noxian steel. Worse than that…" His serrated teeth clenched. "It was a Medarda warship. Part of his House Matriarch's personal fleet in Noxus. A war convoy disguised as a merchantman, likely carrying weapons or spies." The irony of now serving a city where another Medarda wove her web of influence was not lost on me, and judging by the bitterness in his voice, not on him either. "A mistake that cost me the world."
He described the battle in vivid, terrible detail. The disciplined, cold steel of the legionaries defending the Medarda ship. The disorganised fury of his Serpent's Teeth, the best and most feared crew in Bilgewater, being systematically dismantled by the Noxian war machine. It was not a bar brawl at sea; it was a wolf facing a legion.
"They did not fight," Mahr'Lokk said, his voice low, a mixture of contempt and reluctant admiration. "They executed. Every move was calculated. Shield formations on the bridge, archers in the rigging… They turned a merchant ship into a floating fortress in less than a minute."
"My ship, the Serpent's Tooth, was gutted," he continued, the image clearly seared into his mind. "Siege harpoons tore through our sails. Catapults launched pots of alchemical fire that turned our deck into an inferno. I watched men I'd broken bread with for twenty years, men who had survived krakens and the Black Mist, be consumed by the flames… or cut down by the methodical advance of the legionaries."
He paused, his breathing heavy. "I was wounded, badly, by a spear that went through my shoulder. Cast into the sea like a piece of useless wreckage."
He closed his eyes, but I knew, and Morgana knew, that the image was burning in an eternal fire behind his eyelids, projected onto the dark screen of his mind. "The last thing I saw, before the darkness took me… was him. Azh'Kai. On the burning sterncastle, his grandfather's sword—an ancient, serrated sea-lord's cutlass—in his hand, still fighting. Alone. A boy. A fifteen-year-old boy. Against a wall of black-armoured legionaries who just kept coming." His voice broke, a fine but deep crack in a mountain of a man. "His blood… gleaming on the burning wood, under the light of a moon that seemed to be drowning in the fire."
The cabin fell silent. 'The Drowned Moon'. The ship's name was now an epitaph. 'Sangremar'. The legacy that had died with his son in the middle of an ocean of fire.
"The sea spat me out on some forgotten island beach days later," he continued, his voice now just a tired murmur, that of a man at the end of his strength. "The tide didn't even have the mercy to let me die with them. I believed, for a long time, that my place was at the bottom of the ocean, drowned with my honour and my pain."
His confession, raw and unguarded, filled the space between us.
"Even now," he said finally, opening his eyes, and I saw the torment that lived there, a private ocean of agony that never calmed. "Years later… Cassandra Kiramman found me, gave me this," he gestured to the cabin, to the ship, "a second chance. A new life. But every night… every single night, I go back to that burning deck. I see his face. I smell the fire. The blood. And I wake up screaming." He looked at us, the plea of a broken man in his gaze, stripped of all a captain's pride. "Can you make a tea for that? A tea that will give me just… one night. One single night of silence?"
Morgana reached a hand across the table, the gesture a silent bridge of pure empathy, acknowledging the depth of his pain.
I, on the other hand, saw not just the pain, but the path. The mechanism of my brain, cold and analytical even in the face of tragedy, connected the pieces of the puzzle. His pain. His story. His inescapable need. And my opportunity, which now no longer felt like a manipulation, but… a solution.
"Yes, Captain," I said, and my voice was calm, firm, the voice of a master artisan speaking of their craft. "I can make that tea."
A spark of cautious hope appeared in his weary eyes. He leaned forward.
"I will make you a proposal," I went on. "Not based on promises, but on results. Tonight, I will prepare for you a single dose. An infusion made with ingredients I carry with me for 'emergencies'. It is designed to induce a deep sleep, to silence the echoes of the past, to give you the night of peace you so desperately seek."
I paused, letting the weight of the offer settle.
"If tomorrow morning you wake and you have slept without the company of your ghosts… if the tea works… then my price is your cooperation. You will disembark us in Bilgewater and use your contacts to ensure us a safe stay for as long as we deem necessary for our research. In return," I added, "when we depart from there, I will not only give you a generous supply of the ingredients for this tea, but I will also write down for you the precise method of its preparation, so that you may have your silent nights for as long as you need."
He stared at me, the sharp brain of a former Reaver King analysing every angle of my offer. It was audacious. Arrogant, even. I was betting my entire credibility and the safety of our voyage on the effect of a single cup of tea.
"And if it doesn't work?" he asked, his natural scepticism warring with his need.
"Then it doesn't work," I replied with a simple shrug. "I will have overestimated my skills, and you will take us directly to Ionia, with no further discussion. Your only cost will have been a strange-tasting cup of tea. What do you have to lose, Captain, besides one more bad night's sleep?"
He looked at Morgana, as if seeking a sign that this wasn't a trick. She just gave a slight nod, validating my confidence.
He was silent for a long, torturous minute, weighing the impossible promise against a decade of torment. The choice between the risk of being deceived and the chance, however small, to silence the screams in his mind. Finally, he gave a slow nod, the decision made.
"Alright, little tea-lady," he said, and his voice was that of a man placing a final bet. "Show me your miracle."
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🎆 New Year's Message – Author's Note 🎆
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Hi, my dear readers 💜
I'm stopping by real quick (which is obviously a lie) to wish you all a Happy New Year! May this new year bring you health, peace, great stories to read, characters that emotionally destroy you (in the best way possible), and hopefully, a little less suffering… or at least well-written suffering.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who read, commented, screamed internally, theorized, suffered along with me, and stayed here. Truly, this story exists because of you just as much as it exists because of me.
I've posted a brand new chapter as a New Year's gift. Consider it my way of saying "thank you for staying" and "let's start the year together, emotionally unwell, but happy." 💥📖
I hope you enjoy it, feel it, yell a little (internally or not), and step into 2026 with me the same way you stepped into this story: curious, invested, and just a little bit emotional.
Happy New Year, you wonderful people.
See you in the comments 👀💜
With love (and chaos),
The author ✨