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From within his celestial prison Aurelion Sol felt the cosmos quiver, and a bright light beyond followed.
Ignoring the throb from the abomination upon his brow, he drifted his form towards the disturbance. As he approached, galaxies melting by, the source materialized into view. It was one of his. It was the one he despised.
Of course. Runeterra.
Aurelion Sol reached within him, drawing upon his power as he had done an infinite amount of times, intending to smite the insignificant rock and be done with it once and for all. The golden crown glowed, flames of white-hot malice searing him to momentary blindness. Aurelion Sol roared and the cosmos quaked.
Silence. And then…
Runeterra glittered softly.
Curiously, Aurelion Sol drifted closer. What he saw mystified him for the first time in an eternity.
Laid out before him was Runeterra, as it was, is, and would be, each of its possibilities and existences in space and time strung together in the web that fabricated and connected every aspect of the cosmos. That much was as expected.
What he did not expect were the glimmering veins of ultraviolet something that stretched out from a voracious, pulsating core at an intersection of the planes. It was a near-indiscernible mess, spidering out some sort of anomaly eons beyond the planet itself.
Aurelion Sol considered this. No force from Runeterra could be strong enough to reach that far. Not even Targon had that kind of power.
Carefully, Aurelion Sol magnified his view further.
At the center, he saw two humans. Men, if he had to guess, but their forms were strange, vacillating between physical and something odd and astral. One seemed to be a mostly ordinary man, made mostly of dust touched with a pinprick of power. The other, a glowing mote laced with the arcane…and something else. He was a conflagration of flesh and spirit and something cold and inorganic, and he seemed to be the source of the anomaly.
A mage?
An infinite number of versions of the two men echoed through reality, and it made his head hurt to look at them in a way that had nothing to do with the Aspects’ hold over him. He watched as the Arcane one, in infinite realities, drifted as a beam of light through the cosmos. He was doing something. Aurelion Sol watched as the little light wandered, stopping and slowing periodically to interact with beings he encountered world after world. He was changing them, and when he left them behind they were no longer warm, seemingly transformed into more of the same odd, cold material.
He watched as the little light reached a dark edge of reality. It hovered there, unsure, for what was probably several lifetimes. Then it did the only thing it could: it turned around. The little light tottered aimlessly, devoid of purpose.
Aurelion Sol looked back to the epicenter and, ignoring the maelstrom of realities, forced himself to focus on the moment where the strings converged.
“...Beauty in imperfections, Viktor.”
“Promised you…”
“...Give me this? Why?”
“...End to the world’s suffering…”
“...Endless solitude…”
"...You can show me this."
“...Go. Jayce.”
Aurelion Sol watched transfixed as the two little lights wove in and out and around each other in a dance that transcended space and time themselves, over and over. He watched for what was probably millenia, and minutes, and everything in between, and every time, he watched as the Arcane light ended its journey lost and alone. Except…
Aurelion Sol drifted more closely to one existence, its gossamer thread more dim and quietly humming than the other realities around it. It was the only thread devoid of the strange ultraviolet anomaly that coated the others.
From the edge of his vision, he noticed a third light, another tiny human, who did something and jostled the reality like a guitarist plucking their instrument.
“...Finish this together.”
A moment hanging in time, like the entire universe was waiting with bated breath. Then…
The web began to dissolve. It happened so suddenly and with such decisiveness that Aurelion Sol could do nothing but stare in mild horror. He watched as the intricate latticework that was the two men and their Runeterran realities disintegrated, one string at a time.
In a panic, Aurelion Sol began to breathe life into the patchwork, trying in vain to preserve the two lights lest they disappear into oblivion for good. But it was no use. For every timeline he breathed back into life, the third light was there to pluck the guitar string, repeating the motion in a loop that refused to relent.
Aurelion Sol bore witness until only the ultravioletless reality remained. And then he watched as the two men held each other, their world whirling and screaming around them, and the strange anomaly consumed them in a bright flash. Nothing remained, not their bodies or essences--nothing but the endless void of space.
Blink.
………Blink………
…………………Blink…………………………
The third light. The Echo, on repeat. He had no idea how the little human was doing it, but Aurelion Sol watched in awe as the Echo restarted time each time the anomaly consumed the two men.
Blink.
……………BLINK……………
Aurelion Sol snapped out of his stupefaction. The moment was repeating, but he realized with a start that the length of time between repetitions was growing. He realized, if he wanted to do something, he ought to do it now.
Aurelion Sol reached within himself once again. Immediately the crown burned in protest, but Aurelion Sol ignored it.
He imagined a star, the way he always had. He imagined that he was branding a star into existence, using his breath of life once again, but this time he directed it at, directed it into, the two little lights at the epicenter of the implosion.
…………………………… BLINK ……………………………
The Echo flickered, and went out, and Aurelion Sol knew it was his last chance to get it right.
Not knowing what possessed him, Aurelion Sol screamed through the pain at his brow, and poured every vestige of power within him into the two little men in the little astral plane on the little insignificant rock.
Why? Why? Why? he asked himself. You should be collecting your power to free yourself from the Aspects. But he had committed himself to this, and now it was too late to turn back.
So Aurelion Sol roared and roared and roared, and he imagined the two little lights in a place he thought they might like, in a way he thought might make them…happy? He did not know of such things, and certainly could not imagine how they might feel, but he knew the odd feeling he’d felt as he watched their spirits dance through eternity, and he channeled that feeling. No one or thing had ever given him that feeling before, and he hoped he could at least give it back to them.
And then, just as fast as it had all started, it was over.
The anomaly imploded for the final time, and right before the two little lights disappeared, Aurelion Sol plucked them from the inky void and spread them across the celestial sky. Two constellations, Jayce and Viktor, foreheads pressed and arms wrapped around one another, until the end of time itself.
Destroying Targon would have to wait another day.
Somewhere else, somewhere both nowhere and everywhere all at once, two men blinked, and awoke. They were not alive, but they were also not dead. Somehow, their souls had been preserved, saved, by something or someone, and placed in a quiet corner away from everything else.
To each other, they felt corporeal, and to each of them, the world around them was real enough. In its way, it was all too perfect, of course. The people and places they interacted with all had a pearlescent haze about them. Time never truly seemed to pass. They knew it had to be some sort of dream, or death, or both. They knew not if it would ever end, or if they could ever return to their old world and the people they left behind. But what they did know was that they had each other--not some imagination or projection of each other, as they both had feared at first. No. It was the two of them, well and truly, with their memories and lived experiences intact, and nothing but an endless expanse of possibility before them.
It wasn’t just “something,” a consolation prize. It wasn’t just preferable to a horrible death by magical explosion-–it was well and properly good. It was better than both believed they deserved, at first.
But in time, they learned that whether deserved or not, it was a gift they had been given, and they weren’t about to argue with whatever cosmic force had bestowed it upon them. Instead, they chose to count their blessings.
Instead, they were what the celestial dragon had hoped to understand.