Lux flitted through a dirty street, the staccato of her heartbeat in sync with her deep breathing. She kept track of the sounds of heavy footsteps and rattling of armor, mixed with the occasional curse. She sidestepped into a small alley, wishing to get rid of her pursuers. They were not trained in stealth, and she could hear them two streets down. Hastily, she moved the papers she had obtained from her satchel into a pocket of her cloak. She was much more soft-footed than those who chased her. Since she was running, she knew she would attract attention in the lower streets of the city. Gazes followed her, indicating that people were trying to either get away from her or deciding if she was threat enough to walk away. That was probably the only reason those thugs someone had labeled as guards were still able to follow her.

After doing such a splendid job in the borderlands, this would be her first mission in the heart of Noxus, the capital of evil, Noxus Prime. She had no backup and her superiors had made it very clear that she would have to stay a long time. Everything in Noxus Prime was so very different from her home country, different from anything she had ever experienced before. There had been attempts to educate her on the culture that awaited her, but the available knowledge had been sparse and barely enough to inform her on what to expect in the melting pot of different, and often opposing, cultures that blended in Noxus's capital. Nothing was to go unexpectedly.

Lux had spent the last two months with getting familiar with her new surroundings and learning her way around a small part of the groundwork. Noxus Prime was nothing like she had expected it to be. The sheer diversity in people, in appearances, in fighting styles, and in surveillance techniques was enough to make her head spin with ideas and new possibilities. Thus, during her first mission, she had gotten caught. More precisely, seen, so she had to take a hasty leave through said undercity to avoid apprehension.

She cautiously passed two more crossroads, creating distance between her and the unfriendly sounds of the so-called guards she had alarmed.

She turned onto an even smaller road, relying on its windings to make it hard for anyone to keep her in their line of vision. Another plus: no people occupied her path, which meant nobody would be able to point out the direction she had taken. The absence of other people did not disturb Lux. A silent thump, as if something large and wet hit the ground, was the only noise that could be heard in front of her. Nothing that sounded as obviously dangerous as what chased behind her. Cautiously, she slowed her advance, peeked around the corner, and flinched back.

Two corpses littering the alley in front of her were not unusual. But the third person, a hooded figure with a wicked-looking blade strapped to their arm, gripping around a fourth person's throat, most certainly was. This was the reason nobody wanted to be in this alley, Lux concluded. Curse her luck to run into what looked like a crime scene. The same wet sound resonated in the otherwise empty street again, and Lux connected the noise to the body which had just been dropped to the ground. She had barely time to think before the only remaining living person vanished into thin air. Lux's instincts kicked in and she threw a quickly formed ball of light into the direction where she had last seen the shadow. The detonation revealed a figure emerging through the shadows in front of her, not from her side like she had expected. This man was unnaturally fast. Using his moment of distraction due to the sudden brightness, Lux cast and threw a quick binding which interrupted his advance, sealing him on the spot.

Guessing from the three dead bodies, this person seemed not to be one to mess with. Cold, golden eyes glinted from under the hood as he tested out his range of motion, and Lux knew that she would not be able to hold her binding for terribly much longer. Plus, she could hear her followers already. The detonation had not gone unheard. Damn, she needed de-escalation — and a way to convey that she could care less about the corpse-littered street.

"Hey Golden Eyes, sorry for interrupting your party. Don't you need to tend to your friends?" She chirmed in the lightest tone she was able to muster, pulling her light tighter against his struggling.

The answer was cold and hissed, "This party is already dead."

Lux was not sure if he was continuing her joke or not, and her instincts told her he probably was not. Noxians and humor was a whole different topic, one she had not even begun to approach.

The sounds of armored boots torturing cobblestones drew closer, combined with a barked, "There's something over here!"

Lux took a deep breath, smile unwavering, "Sad, the night is still so young. Want an invitation to mine?" She winked and stepped back towards another, presumably unoccupied, alleyway.

He leaned against the tendrils of light. Lux did not let the effort it took to hold him show on her face.

"Can't be more fatigued than my guests," He hissed while eyeing her baton and her composure, clearly trying to place her and her abilities. Luckily, her face would give away nothing, it was just a manipulation of light to look like someone else.

Four men clad in black armor jogged around the corner, halting at the sight of her. Lux dropped her binding and improvised. The hooded man now stood between her and the other four, looking back and forth between them. In typical Noxian fashion, they fanned out, giving each individual the chance to fight the way they preferred. The hooded man stepped backward and tilted his head to the side, placing the wall at his back so he was still able to observe all five people at once. Lux noted how his right, bladed hand tightened into a fist while his face stayed void of expression.

"You!" The group's leader lifted his heavy sword and pointed it to the dark figure, separating him from his designated prey, "Leave quick enough and maybe we'll let you live." A cruel grin split his scarred face.

The man in question took a moment to regard the four persons standing in front of him, fist relaxing, before glancing back at Lux, "I take back what I said. Yours is more boring." He supposedly relaxed and straightened himself.

She lifted her shoulders and smiled apologetically. "Maybe I mixed up the invitations?"

He snorted, turning his back to Lux's pursuers. An insult in Noxus, she had learned, and slowly sauntered back the alley he had emerged from, picking at his arm-blade. Lux did not allow herself to exhale loudly. This was one of the more favorable outcomes, as one of her problems was leaving, given that the guards were not about to—

"Hey, Hoodie!"

—do something stupid.

The man in question continued moving, slowly enough to add to his former insult. Blades were attached to his cloak, and the abnormality made her question his heritage. An attire like that was either completely over the top, or she had encountered someone who did not belong to the lower districts of Noxus Prime.

"We are to grab her," Another guard tried to intervene. Lux had already sneaked a few more steps backward, "We can finish him off afterward."

The leader spat on the street, turning to Lux. He did not see the dark figure halting his steps. "Shoot him now, get him later. Can't waste time on an insigi… isini… unimportance like that."

The head of the man in question whipped around and Lux caught a glance of his emotionless face. Someone who did not take insults kindly, she assessed.

"Need vocabulary lessons?" Lux offered sympathetically and as she heard the familiar click of a crossbow, one not directed at her, she dashed around the corner and ran as if the Seven Sentinels were after her. Not a second later she heard the sharp sounds of a blade being dragged over soft skin, wet smacking and the gurgling of a man drowning on his own blood.

Her pursuers would not bother her anymore, she concluded, not without horror about how quickly the situation had escalated. She dashed around some more corners before abruptly changing directions, heart thundering in her chest. She needed a place to hide and change. A shabby tavern was just what she was searching for and she slid to a stop, took a deep breath to calm herself, pulled her cowl over her head and stepped inside.

She calculated how long the stranger would have needed to kill her party, as he had seemed confident enough, and she hoped she had reached the tavern before he had caught on her trail. If he was trailing her now. There was a possibility he would want to repay her for the trouble he went through, so she took no chances.

At the moment she looked unassuming. Shaggy black hair, brown eyes, slightly tanned, and rugged clothes, so nobody paid her much attention. She was nothing more than another stranger. After ordering one of those disgusting fermented root-liquids the Noxian underclass dared to call beer, she had analyzed the level of drunkenness in the room. She took the mug of beer and walked to the backside of the tavern. There, she swept away the uneven chair leg of the drunkest, biggest, and most dangerous looking man in the room, so he bumped into another quiet drinker and, as expected, started to curse loudly. Lux resumed her way as quickly as possible, listening to the unfolding insults and the sounds of a starting tavern brawl.

When she arrived at the back of the locality nobody paid her any attention, so she averted her face into the shadows of her cowl and changed. Her eyes became muddier, her hair became a mousy grey, and she gained more wrinkles of a spent life. Her clothes were nothing to be changed easily, but it would have to make due.

She waited for the first batch of people leaving through the back door to mingle and get out on the street again.

She exercised even more caution than usual on the way to her apartment, but no one seemed to follow her.

When nothing happened and as the following days stayed quiet, she relaxed again.

At the second meeting, she wore a different face and different colors.

Lux shuffled through the notes of the mage she had kept her eyes on for a few weeks. He had appeared at the edge of her attention, just a side-note in papers she had stolen, but he had struck her as odd. The eastern parts of Demacia had experienced an unusual plague of insects, Argoth, locusts, and other creatures with too many legs to be comfortable with. They seemed to concentrate on strategically valuable basic commodities, and people started blaming witches. The annulment-slums had been searched through one time already, and Lux had heard about several casualties. She needed to find the real cause of the insect attacks, hopefully, there was someone else to blame, and stop them.

The shrine she stood next to was an indicator she was indeed on the right path. Papers in hand, she examined the figure of a twisted, eight-legged, eight-eyed monstrosity that resembled a spider. Were there teeth instead of the usual mandibles? Very inaccurate, Lux decided and put the figurine down again.

Then she noticed something missing. It was not the tug at her conscience she had anticipated. She had tried something new, two thin strings of light laid out and tied to her mind, so anything breaking the light should warn her of an intruder. In theory. But it had not, the light had simply vanished. Most likely an ordinary malfunction, but Lux would not be taking chances, so she spelled herself invisible and stilled her motions.

Two beats of her heart later, a shadow moved to the center of the room before solidifying into a person who turned their head first and body second to inspect the room.

A hood pulled down had cast his face into darkness, but he wore the same colors and the same unique blade strapped to his arm. It was clearly the man she had encountered a few weeks prior.

He moved effortlessly soundlessly and had made his appearance without Lux catching on the slightest whisper, so she was sure he had to use some special kind of magic. Their last encounter, especially the fact that he was here, alive and breathing, confirmed her initial suspect: this man was not one to be messed with. A piece of advice she would gladly follow, so she opened her mouth to silence her breathing.

The man spun around a second time, the gold in his eyes flashed in reflection as they darted over where Lux hid in plain sight. After another moment of absolute silence, the man vanished as soundlessly as he had appeared.

Lux waited, as motionless and as quiet as she could be, until she heard footsteps approaching from the hallway.

A small man clad in dark robes entered the room, closed the door behind him and shambled to his desk. Lux looked at the papers in her hands. Oh no, he would probably miss these.

"What?" The presumed owner of this room exhaled, rummaging through the contents of his desk before he looked around carefully and lifted his hand, "In the name of the Great Swarm…"

He did not get to finish his sentence, for Golden Eyes appeared behind him, grabbed his long hair to pull it back, and drew a blade over his throat. Blood spurted out of the wound, over the desk, and the notes Lux was not holding. Lux watched in horror while the other man tried to mutter something, but his sliced windpipe made that impossible. The assassin held the other man's head until the stream of blood ran dry before he took another look through the room. His expression was still hardly readable due to the shadows of his hood, but he did not look moved. Nothing indicated that he had just killed another human being in cold blood.

Lux continued to exercise her stillness, not daring to blink, not daring to move a single muscle.
After what felt like hours, the darkly clad man pushed the corpse into the office chair where it collapsed lifelessly before he vanished again.

Keeping her powers up had begun to hurt her head. Lux counted her accelerated heartbeat and let two hundred beats pass before she allowed herself to move. She did not let out a breath, she did not lower her invisibility, she just tiptoed to the closed door and listened. It was quiet outside, so she pushed the handle down.

With a thwack, a dagger embedded itself into the wood of the doorframe, grazing the skin of her hand. A glance backward revealed the cloaked form she had expected to be gone. Her hitching breath must have provided enough of a target for another blade, thrown accurately ten centimeters below her mouth. Lux had barely enough time to lift her hand, yanking up her shield, to deflect the weapon. She had hoped not to expose more of her abilities than she already had, but her plans changed. The whisper of a cloak gave her a direction to throw another binding, the light chinking noise told her it had hit home.

"Fool me once…" She heard the quiet whisper, barely audible above the approaching sounds of footsteps from outside. At least two more men were on their way to this study.

"It looks like our party is cut short again," Lux, still invisible, pulled the dagger out of the doorframe and collected the one her shield had repelled. She heard one tendril of light snap, a reminder that one trick seldom worked twice with intelligent people. "Patience is not your true virtue, right?" She walked to the window and placed the blades on the windowsill. Maybe that counted as a Noxian peace offering?

Another snort answered her as another tendril snapped.

The footsteps halted in front of the closed door and a sharp knock resonated in the study. Lux positioned herself next to the door and let her binding fade. He glanced at where he guessed she was accurately, the glare went directly to her eyes before he averted his face to the blades she had laid out. He shook his head and vanished right before the door flung open.

The anger surging through the interrupter manifested in a loud shout as he stepped into the room, gaze fixing on the corpse. A shudder ran through Lux as she looked at the discarded body, laying in a pool of its own blood. She quickly averted her eyes and slipped behind the back of the newcomer, taking her leave before the yell of alarm could attract even more attention.

This time she was even more careful while leaving, keeping her invisibility up until she found a crowded tavern where she was able to mingle with people.

With the sigil she had spotted on one of his blades, it was not hard to figure out who the man was. The crest belonged to family Du Couteau, a noble family, famous assassins connected with the Noxian High Command since nearly forever. The most prominent member was the head of the house, Marcus Du Couteau, followed by his eldest daughter, Katarina. She was a special kind of pain and Lux was sure she had heard Garen talk about the woman more than once. What had been concealed from Demacian intelligence was that General Marcus Du Couteau, Blade of Noxus, had brought a skilled boy from the streets into the family who now, years later, acted as his extended blade, his agent, and probably many more things, guessing from the heavy silence everybody fell into when asked about the man. From her contacts, Lux had heard not only his title, "The Blade's Shadow," but also a name, Talon, and the notion that a surefire way to get on top of the Blade's blacklist was to call his Shadow a street rat, gutter trash, and similar demeaning names.

Rumors said he extended the control of the Du Couteau's far beyond the borders of Noxus. Talon seemed to be a fitting name for the single-person task force of a legendary family.

Altogether, not a person Lux would voluntarily mess with. And, if she had a say in it, someone she would love to never meet again.

Yet here she was, a wickedly formed blade pressed to her throat and something wet at her back, the whisper of a cloak not enough to act as a proper warning.

"I propose a truce," She sputtered out, pressing herself into the fabric-clad body behind her, while spreading her fingers out in the universal gesture of surrender, letting the device she had held fall to the ground with a heavy clink.

"And you are in a position to... how?" A rough voice hissed in her ear.

"You are leaking on my back," It was a shot in the dark, but it could not possibly get worse, she thought. There was the coppery smell of blood in the air.

The blade in her neck drew blood. The stinging pain followed seconds later, the blade sharp enough as to not hurt at first contact. It could get worse.

"You would likely get out of here alone, but finishing your job?" She replenished, refusing to feel fear. Fear never helped, especially not in Noxus. She would make it out here alive. Her baton was tucked safely into her belt, close enough so she could probably sneak her shield in between the offending knife. If it would only disconnect from her skin just the slightest. She waited some more painful moments in which she felt blood trickling down her collar bone, before adding "I can do something about that leaking."

The tip of the blade pressed into her skin for a second longer, then it was gone. He must have been much worse for wear than he looked like. Still, Lux did not dare to use her magic yet, for the glow that always accompanied it would likely give them away.

"Turn around," Her pursuer ordered.

Lux obeyed, blade millimeters above her skin, while her blood stained her collar. Luckily the fabric was dark. A distant part of her mind noted that she had not been this close to another human being since... Since when? Close enough to smell sweat and blood and the specific scent of the man in front of her.

She glanced upwards, into the shadows of his hood, where she was met with the cold, golden shimmer of his demanding glance.

"You got yourself a deal," He hissed, glance flickering to the door before it returned to her, restlessly checking and rechecking her stance, her posture, and her movements.

Very slowly she grabbed the hem of his tunic, pulling it up at the same pace to take a look at the nasty, deep gash, twelve centimeters long across his lower abdomen. According to his state of training, there was not much dermis to cover the slashed through musculus rectus abdominis, under which the oblique muscles looked also torn. The cut possibly went deeper. In that case, his intestines could be damaged as well.

A potentially fatal wound, unless healed magically. Did they have magical healers in Noxus? Or did they use magic only to destroy? Lux did not know. It had to be extremely painful as well, but his movements were perfectly controlled, his face giving away nothing but cold determination.

She spared herself the compassionate whimper and placed her fingers at the sides of the wound to press the edges together. He showed no acknowledgment of pain, just observed her fingers tensely. She adjusted the size of her binding spell and wove it through muscles and skin before pulling it together. The bleeding stopped and the edges of the wound adapted, so she disconnected the spell from herself and attached it on his person. The skin stayed knit together as she released her hold on it.

"This will open again if I fade," She smiled apologetically, innocently blinking upwards, and was surprised to see something tugging his lips upwards for a second. She seemingly played this well enough, for the blade left her neck and the man took a step back. Lux also retreated until she saw him vanishing. Only then she dared to turn and get on her way.

She was not surprised by the dead bodies littering the ground on her way to the library. That would make her information less valuable, but that was not her primary concern.

She lived.

Hi :)

All hail to my new beta-reader jinxiphos (you can find her on AO3 under that name). She graciously volunteered to look over everything in this story...from the beginning on…. and yes, she started with the first chapter. I owe her eternal gratefulness. All of the mistakes still present are my own.
Until now, she managed to look over the chapters one to six, with chapter six having gained a new paragraph featuring Sylas (you can find it at the end of the chapter, if you want to read it).

A few words to the universe this here sets into:

It starts as a collection of important meeting-points of the characters until the actual plot starts happening.
Loosely adheres to the new lore (well- more like a mixture of old and new lore, but the new one doesn't completely rule out some parts of the old one- feel free to ask and point out if you think something is completely shitty) plus-need that to be said?-a few alterations of my own.

Mostly I write for myself, but I think my favorite pairing in LoL is underrepresented, so I post this here :)

Comments, critics and kind words are always appreciated.

M for smut and violence in later chapters.

Disclaimer:

League of Legends obviously doesn't belong to me. Because I would make Talon and Lux canon.
I read a lot of fanfiction and am sure I picked inspiration from a few stories out here.