A/N: This fic is a holiday season gift for my most excellent friend LogosMinusPity.

LogosMinusPity is the reason why Katarina/Riven is my OTP - and I'd judge it follows that she's also the reason I've ended up writing so much League fanfic over the past few years. She's also an amazing writer and every time I sit down and read one of her fics I think, "Wow, I want to be able to write like that when I grow up." Noxian!Shyvana is something she came up and it's an idea that I kinda fell in love with.

Thanks to CrimsonNoble for beta-ing while I worked on this project.

In the Calm

The forest burns.

In its burning, it stinks of charred flesh.

Near the edge of the blaze, Darius raises his free hand in a vain attempt to wave the air clear. A day ago it rained and the forest is giving off a lot of smoke – there's more smoke than fire. He can't see hardly twenty feet frontways but he can hear men screaming all around, their terror rising above the roar of the fire.

In his other hand, he holds his axe ready.

Ready for what?

Scouts said the Demacian camp is in the woods. But the woods are smoking and the Demacians are screaming. Something's in there with them.

Not Noxians. Darius is at the front of the strike. The other Noxians are behind him. It would take a special kind of stupid to engage the Demacian camp without at least a full company as backup. It's getting towards winter, the end of the campaign season. The especially stupid are all dead. So it's not Noxians.

Movement – ahead, slightly left.

Darius adjusts his grip on his weapon as a man in Demacian royal blue and gold comes stumbling out of the grey. There's terror on his soot-streaked face and even in the shit smoke air, Darius is pretty sure he can see the whites of the man's eyes.

The soldier has just enough time to open his mouth to scream before his head goes flying.

It hits the ground with a dull thud and his decapitated body falls almost in time with it.

Feh. Man was half-broken before he even saw Darius and the Noxians. No challenge there.

Darius lifts his axe over his head and swings it once in a high arc to get the attention of the three companies at his back. They're still at his back, haven't run in ahead of him. Noxians love battle, love glory, hate fire. Fire's not a thing you can wrestle into submission. Can't kill fire with steel. "Spread out," he bellows. "Fury Company, on me."

He doesn't wait to see if anyone comes to follow him before he starts forward towards the blaze. Fury Company is one of the best companies under his command. Their commander is strong, which is saying very little because all his commanders are strong, and she's competent, which is saying a lot because competent commanders are a rare thing indeed. Her Fury Company will follow him in and they'll stand their ground and battle to the death if it comes to it.

Darius is worried about the burning trees, worried one will collapse unexpectedly on him, but he's sure as the frozen hells not worried about a fight.

There's no question in his mind about going in. He's a Noxian.

The forest isn't very thick and it's not very big. It's more a copse than anything, just extensive enough to hide the Demacian camp from a distance.

The trees are pines.

Their thick smoke smells like their sticky sap and it clogs Darius' throat.

The screaming hasn't abated, though it bleeds into the steady crackle of fire. The Demacians are still fighting, still, likely, dying.

Darius keeps an eye to the burning canopy as he threads his way towards the screaming, affording the trees as wide a berth as he can, given the terrain. Beneath his feet, the leaf litter smolders. There was a heavy rain a bare two days ago, otherwise the ground itself would be blazing.

There's coughing behind him.

Darius looks back, looks at Riven. The commander has finished coughing and her face is twisted in a snarl, as if she can intimidate the smoke to get the fuck out of her face. She's carrying her enormous sword in one hand and there's more fire in her eyes than there is in all the woods around them and damn is Darius fortunate to have her and her men in his army. It's good for him, having her behind him. If he falters, he trusts her to take his head like he did to the general before him.

Darius turns his attention back to ploughing forward.

The screaming's louder now – must be getting close.

With all the smoke, Darius doesn't realize he's found the clearing with the Demacian camp until he's standing at its edge. He's on a raised bit of ground, nowhere near tall enough to be a hill, but between the boost he gets from the ground and his own natural height, he has probably the best view he'll have for a while of the smoke-filled battlefield, the remains of the enemy camp.

Demacians, in disarray, fighting a dragon.

During the split second of taking in situation, a Demacian infantryman rams a halberd through the dragon's shoulder. Already wounded with – Darius isn't going to count – a fucking lot of weapons sticking out of its hide, the dragon reels, stumbles, starts to collapse.

Darius shifts to hold his axe with both hands.

The dragon distraction is dead or close enough and there's no time like the present.

Darius takes a deep breath, willing himself not to cough, and bellows the order to charge.

They slam into the Demacian group from the rear and they cut the gold-clad soldiers down.

It's over in minutes.

Darius scores three kills.

There's no room for precision and two hands make for a powerful blow. All three of them, he smashes his weapon into plate-clad bodies, caving in armor, caving in ribcages, folding the men over the head of his axe.

Darius rips his axe free of the last soldier – the blade cut through the steel armor and got lodged in his chest – and looks around.

The clearing is still dark with smoke, but the fire sounds less loud than before. Maybe it's just that he's got less adrenaline. Or maybe the dragon was causing most of the burning and the trees were wet enough from the rain to damp it down with the dragon dead. In any case, everything smells like overcooked meat.

Where did the dragon go? Corpse should be massive.

"General! Over here!"

Darius turns towards his name. Title. Name. Whatever. Voice was female – there's only one woman in Fury Company. Riven's not one for wasted words, so it's important.

She's standing a good ways off, just barely in sight and over where Darius thinks the dragon corpse ought to be. Her white hair is dark with soot and has red streaks from blood. Probably not hers. Her steel chestplate has a bloody handprint sliding down it. Definitely not hers.

Not satisfied all the Demacians are actually dead, Darius keeps his axe ready as he walks over bodies towards his commander. He goes carefully. Dead bodies covered in their own entrails are shit footing.

When Darius gets to Riven, she jerks her head towards…

Huh.

Dead dragon turned into a weird dead dragon-woman.

Don't see that every day.

Darius picks his way over more fallen soldiers, corpses charred, ripped apart, or both. When he gets close to the dragon-woman, he squats down.

The dragon-woman has horns and blue skin. She's not wearing so much as a stitch. There aren't any weapons sticking out of her anymore, must have fallen out when she got smaller, but she's still absolutely shredded. Her skin's blue, but her blood's red.

Her eyes hang half-shut, gazing out blankly. She's got weird golden eyes that look sort of like a cat's.

Is she conscious? Is she looking at him?

When the dragon-woman twitches, Darius tenses, gets ready to bring his axe down and finish her off, but he doesn't follow through.

The dragon-woman did them a favor and he's not a savage.

If she's twitching, then she's not dead. She's clearly not in good shape though.

Darius shoulders his axe. With his free arm, he scoops the dragon-woman up and drapes her over his other shoulder. She's unexpectedly heavy but he refuses to acknowledge her weight by faltering or slowing his movements in any way. He turns back towards the other Noxians.

Riven gives him a look and Darius thinks he knows what she's asking.

"If it kills us, we deserve to die," he says. "Move out."

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In her two years with the Noxian army, Shyvana has become very good at dice.

She is even better at cards.

What she's not good at is waiting.

Squatting in the late spring mud with the other soldiers around the nailed together planks they use as a table, Shyvana fans her hand of cards out and in and out again, occasionally riffling a finger over the ragged paper edges.

The other soldiers express their own disquiet each in their own way. They cough, they fidget, they look away from the cards out towards the rest of the torch-lit camp.

Shyvana plays cards only with the best, but the quality of the game tonight leaves something to be desired. She's winning, but not because she's better, only because everyone else is playing worse. She'd be annoyed, but there's too much else on her mind.

A bare mile away sits the Demacian fortress, a white stone citadel capped in gold and blue rising above the plain. It's not the capital, just a capital. Provincial. But capital is just a word. What matters about this walled city is that he's there. Jarvan. The golden prince.

Shyvana's clawed feet clench, digging trenches in the mud. She's been hunting her prey for years, up from the jungles of her home, over the mountains, to this cold land of men. And tomorrow she'll have her vengeance. The promise of fire tickles her throat.

"Your move," the soldier to her right grunts.

Shyvana exhales slowly packing her anger down deep. Smoke trickles from her nostrils. There's a time and a place for anger. For the time being, she'd rather not accidentally burn her cards.

Fury Company has approximately five hundred men in its ranks. About half are good at dice. Another half are good at cards. A small handful are bad at both – Shyvana doesn't waste her time with them – and a smaller handful are experts at both. It's from the latter group that Shyvana has amassed a small fortune of brass pennies in winnings.

Some nights, stretched out in her tent, she counts her pennies and imagines herself guarding a golden hoard.

Not this night though.

Shyvana plays her hand and waits for the end of the round.

She wins.

It's not satisfying. It's not calming.

In the two years she's spent marching with the Noxian army, she's found that cards and dice blunt her fury. They keep her from wearing herself out, from burning herself down to exhausted cinders before she's even reached the battlefield.

Tonight, it's not working.

Shyvana loses the next round, then wins the one after that. She's sweeping up her cards, on the verge of announcing she's turning in for the night, when the torchlight flickers and a shadow falls over the board.

Shyvana and the soldiers look up.

The red-haired and green-eyed woman standing above them is not a member of Fury Company. She's – Shyvana still isn't clear what Katarina Du Couteau does exactly. Whatever her occupation is, it's not infantry work. It takes her here and there. She comes and she goes, sometimes spending as long as a month absent, almost never staying in camp more than a day or two. Even when she's in the camp, she's elusive. She stays close to the commander and the both of them are rarely seen for as long as her visit lasts.

A few times when Shyvana first joined Fury Company, she noticed Katarina watching her from a distance, like some predator sizing up a meal, waiting for the right moment to strike. It set Shyvana on edge in a way she couldn't quite describe in the awkward language of the men who live north of the mountains.

When she mentioned it to the commander, Riven asked if it made her uncomfortable. Shyvana said yes because she wasn't sure what other northern word there was for it. She hasn't seen Katarina watching her since then. The absence of the unsolicited attention relieves her but also leaves her with a sort of abstract disappointment.

It's not a feeling she has ever dwelt long on though.

Vengeance is a narrow road.

The soldiers clustered around the makeshift table shift to make room and Katarina squats down to join them. Shyvana deals out the cards and includes herself.

Katarina wins the round.

And she wins the next one and the one after that too. When she wins the third game, the other soldiers find reasons to excuse themselves. Shyvana glares. They don't normally leave when someone wins three times in a row. Normally, they double their bets. Katarina has driven them off, somehow.

Katarina deftly sweeps up the cards and starts to shuffle. "They think I cheated," Katarina remarks. "Duke's Fief?" she asks, naming one of the only games good for two people.

Duke's Fief is also infamously complicated. Very few of the soldiers of Fury Company know the rules and even fewer play it. This is a shame because its complexity makes it one of the best distractions available in camp.

Even as she nods, Shyvana feels the tickle of fire in her throat. "Did you?" Shyvana asks. She studies Katarina's pale, scarred face. There's a tension there, in the way her brow is slightly furrowed and the corners of her lips are turned down into the beginnings of a frown.

"Of course not," Katarina says. She says it with such surety that Shyvana suspects her of lying. "I don't need to cheat."

Humans, Shyvana has learned, lie often, often for no reason at all.

"Where is Riven?" Shyvana asks. Katarina and the commander are rarely apart when the former comes visiting. Were Riven present, Shyvana doubts Katarina would slum about driving soldiers away by cheating at cards.

Katarina hesitates, then, terse, "She's at a commander's meeting. For tomorrow." She starts to deal the cards.

Katarina wins three games of Duke's Fief in a row and by the end of the third game Shyvana is spending more time watching Katarina's hands than she is playing her own cards.

Katarina's hands are marked with a web of old and new scars, the sort accumulated from an extensive history of ranking safety a distant second to getting jobs done. Her fingers are long and slim. She wears a single ring, a simple steel band around the fourth finger of her right hand. Shyvana has noticed a few soldiers with similar steel rings, but she's never bothered to ask what they mean. It's a human custom of some sort. If it were important, someone would have told her about it.

Shyvana prefers gold baubles to steel but such a soft metal has no place in a marching army.

"You won't see what's not there," Katarina says dryly. "I'm not cheating. I'm very good at cards."

Shyvana sets her hand of cards down on the board with a bit more force than is strictly necessary. "Teach me," she says.

Both of Katarina's eyebrows shoot up. "Teach you?"

Shyvana refuses to repeat herself.

Katarina stares at Shyvana for a while with bright green eyes that seem unnervingly observant. She rests one hand on the leather-wrapped hilt of a knife at her side. It doesn't seem like a particularly aggressive motion, rather, it's thoughtful. She drums her fingers against the hilt. "Fine," she says.

They play for nearly an hour before Riven returns from her meeting. In that time, Shyvana doesn't win a single round, even with Katarina giving her a full account of her many mistakes after every game. It makes Shyvana's head hurt. How can Katarina juggle so many stratagems at once?

Riven stands behind Katarina silently for a while, watching Katarina and Shyvana play. It's not until Shyvana has lost, again, that she announces her return with a hand on Katarina's shoulder.

Katarina doesn't startle at all and Shyvana thinks that she probably knew Riven was there.

Riven crouches down at the makeshift table next to Katarina.

Without being asked, Katarina deals her in.

Three players makes Duke's Fief a nearly incomprehensible game.

Riven wins the round.

Katarina scowls and instead of dealing again, she packs the cards into their tin. "We're done," she announces.

Riven catches Shyvana's attention with her eyes, and, when she's sure Shyvana is watching, she shrugs very slightly.

Katarina shoves the tin of cards to Shyvana. Shyvana takes it, gingerly. The cards, ink on paper, are precious and delicate. "Keep practicing," Katarina says. "You're not terrible."

Katarina is a far better player than Shyvana and has an acerbic personality. Not terrible is probably high praise from her.

The commander and Katarina both rise and leave together.

With no one else left to play, Shyvana stands and heads to her tent.

The camp is eerily quiet – so quiet that Shyvana can hear the torches burning. A glance up to the sky tells her that it's too early for the camp to be so still. Any other night, men would be up and about, caring for their gear, drinking, rolling dice. Not tonight.

By the time Shyvana ducks into her tent, a simple canvas wedge like all the rest, the reprieve that losing to Katarina bought her is fading. She lies down on her bedroll and all she can think of is the prince.

And how she's going to snap him in half.

Shyvana flips over so that she's lying on her left side and she stares at the ground.

Three years ago her father sensed that hunters were coming. Not rival drakes. Humans.

He set her down on a mountainside and told her to wait. He would deal with them.

The last time she saw her father alive, he was flying down into the valley.

She waited two days before hunger drove her to climb down the mountain. She ate a few roots that she dug up and then went in the direction where she'd thought to find her father.

She found his body.

She found his body covered in deep gashes, places where magesteel had sliced through his red-gold scales. She found his body already picked over by scavengers. She found his body impaled by a golden spear longer than she was tall. She found his body headless and she found the trail his head left when it was hauled away as a trophy.

She stalked the hunters through the jungle for weeks, watching. But there were so many of them. And she was scared.

In her tent, Shyvana's hands ball into fists. She grinds her teeth and smoke rises unbidden from her nose as fire warms the back of her throat.

She hadn't been angry enough.

If she'd had enough fury, she would have shifted and killed them all then and there.

She could still be home. South of the mountains. Where the rain is warm and the jungles care for their own.

But she hadn't understood her rage until she watched the golden prince and his golden knights retreat up the steep mountain paths towards the pass to the north. Out of her reach forever, she'd thought.

The rage had taken her then and it had suffused her bones and she'd shifted for the first time. The pain would have been, should have been, unbearable. But her fury carried her through.

Shyvana rolls onto her back and stares up at the canvas ceiling of her tent where she has sewn a few pennies to remind her of the star shapes south of the mountains. Outside, the torches have dimmed to almost nothing but her yellow cat-like eyes are far more acute than those of humans.

Tomorrow.

She's going to take her fury, her rage, and she's going to tear down the golden prince's fortress and she's going to break him.

She tells herself this again and again and again, over and over, until she falls into a restless sleep.

Dawn comes too soon and not soon enough.

Shyvana rises with the sun and dons her red and gold armor. It was a gift from High Command, presented by Riven, Darius, several other commanders after her first full campaign season with the army. A thank you for being their luck, they said. The colors of Noxus are black and red and silver, but her armor is made to match her scales when she shifts. It's also made, through magics Shyvana doesn't understand and doesn't want to understand, to grow with her during the shift. When Darius gave it to her, he announced that it was cheaper than providing new clothes for her after every battle.

She does not think that the armor is cheaper than even a hundred shirts.

She also thinks that, because the commanders laughed when Darius made his pronouncement, the general was making a joke. Until that point, she had not thought the general possessed a sense of humor. Now, she watches and listens for its rare appearances.

According to even Riven, Shyvana's armor is heavy, but to Shyvana it's light, mobile, and it fits like a glove. Out of all Shyvana's possessions, she values her armor the most. Not a day goes by that she doesn't wipe a cloth over it, check the fittings, worry that she sees dirt. It is the diamond in her hoard of brass.

Outside her tent, officers are collecting their squads and heading out of camp towards what will soon be the battlefield.

Shyvana knows no superiors save for her commander and the general. She goes to the field alone.

As she walks to her place at the front of the Noxian line, her armor gleams in the morning sun. The army is assembled on the plain outside the Demacian city, just outside of bowshot.

Riven nods to her.

Shyvana nods back.

Getting words out of the commander is an ordeal at the best of times. Now, when all the other soldiers are waiting in nervous silence, to attempt would be folly. But Shyvana already has her orders and knows as much of the battle plan as she needs. The greeting is a human formality and a nod suffices.

Riven is fully armored. She wears thick steel plate painted black with the green stripe of Fury Company smeared over her chest, on her back, and over her shoulders. This is the same armor, excepting a few replacement pieces, that she had when Shyvana first met her. The paint has chipped in some places, but the condition of the steel is remarkable. Noxian soldiers are in the habit of caring for their gear assiduously after every battle, sometimes even before they care for their own wounds.

A massive sword rests stabbed into the ground beside Riven and a wooden shield, also painted black with a green stripe across the center, leans against it.

Riven's sword is taller than she is and nearly as wide. It's made of black stone and etched with runes no one in Fury Company, including Riven, can read. The sword, like Shyvana's armor, is one of High Command's gifts. It's Riven's habit to leave it lying about nearby instead of carrying it on her person – it's too unwieldy for anything except slaughter.

As Shyvana moves to stand beside Riven and Riven's sword, Darius' voice comes booming form somewhere down the line.

His shouts hangs in the air for a moment and then it's replaced by the boom of mage-cannons shaking the earth beneath Shyvana's feet.

Enormous stones, quarried from far off and dragged along with the army, stones as large as Shyvana when she's her other self, go hurtling through the air so fast that their trajectories seem less like arcs and more like an arrow fired at close range.

Shyvana thinks that not even a full-blooded drake would stand a chance against one of these missiles.

The Demacian ramparts certainly don't.

It takes nearly an hour but at the end of the hour, the main gate and the sections of wall around it are reduced to a pile of white rubble.

When the mage-cannons finally go quiet, Riven rips her sword from the earth, adjusts her grip, then holds her blade aloft with a single hand. "Shields!"

As one, the Noxian line raises wood shields painted black up and then over their heads. The clatter of it all is almost as deafening as the cannons. Riven herself picks up her own shield and retreats into the line to stand shoulder to shoulder with her men.

This is Shyvana's signal.

She takes a deep breath in and as she breathes out she focuses on the faint taste of fire in her exhalation.

She thinks about anger.

She thinks about fury.

She thinks about her father – rotting body covered in wounds, the saccharine stink of decay filling her nose, the spear staked through his chest, his head cut off and dragged away as a trophy, the golden prince laughing and making merry with his knights.

In Shyvana's eyes the world gets brighter, sharper, and then it goes blurry with pain. Her bones expand, tearing through muscle that can't reshape fast enough to accommodate. Claws rip their way out of her fingers. Her skull cracks as it lengthens.

Through the pain of the change, she thinks only of her vengeance.

When she finishes shifting she is, in the words of others, the size of a respectable house.

Darius once looked at her and remarked that she was bigger than a breadbox. Loaves of bread are not large so she thinks it was another one of his jokes, though no one laughed.

The soldiers around her, all of them giving her a wide berth, look so very small.

But the world – the world is so much brighter and stronger and more vibrant. Shyvana can see colors that don't exist for human eyes. She can smell the nervous sweat seeping from the nearby Noxian soldiers. And she can hear – she can hear everything. She can hear the creak of leather fittings, the soft clink of steel mail, the whispered prayers of humans making their peace with their gods.

Not for the first time Shyvana wonders why it is only fury that lets her find her birthright and she wishes that she could stay in this sharper, more real world even after her rage has run its course. If only – if only…

Riven's voice rings out over the plain, loud enough that all her company can hear. "Advance!"

The way the whole of the Noxian army moves together over the plain with their black shields raised to point up at the clear blue sky and the late morning sun reminds Shyvana of fabric in the wind.

She advances with them, giant clawed feet sinking down into the late spring mud with every step. So tall compared to the rest of the soldiers, Shyvana can see that she is positioned at nearly the center of the line.

As she should be.

Before long, whistling arrows begin to rain down from the high walls of the citadel. Some lucky arrows find their way between the Noxian shields and a few men go down, to be trampled by their comrades, but most arrows end up harmlessly buried in wood. Many strike Shyvana but they glance off of her armor, grown now to be as large as she is. She keeps her membranous wings folded protectively against her.

When they've come close enough to the rubble that remains of the Demacian wall – Shyvana doesn't hear the command, but she hears the high-pitched keening wail of the Noxian army before it charges. It sends shivers down her spine. It is not a natural noise that rips its way from the throats of the Noxian soldiers.

The commander tried to explain it once. It's a challenge to the living and a send-off for the soon to be dead, she'd said.

But it's more than that and Shyvana can feel it in her bones.

When the cry finally finishes, Shyvana tenses.

Now.

The charge is now.

Shyvana doesn't wait for the order.

She launches herself forward, hurtling across the plain towards battle.

The prince is in his citadel.

And she's coming for him.