The room smelled of antiseptic and wilted flowers.

It was the scent of thin hope and thinner air, distilled into brittle light that poured through the tall, grimy windows of Piltover General. The windowpanes rattled faintly with each passing airship—an endless, metallic heartbeat beyond the glass. Viktor had counted them once.

Then twice. By the third round, the world began to swim again.

Viktor lay propped against the starch-stiff incline of the hospital bed, one hand tangled in the coarse blanket, the other cradling a thin copper coil between pale fingers. He wasn’t sure when they had taken his crutch away. Perhaps it was still somewhere in the laboratory, abandoned after he’d collapsed—clumsy, graceless—beside the prototype that had bled blue light into the dark.

Another failure. Another night stolen by this creeping decay.

The physicians had spoken in clipped, neutral tones. Exhaustion. Starvation. Complications from the degeneration they dared not name outright. All words Viktor already knew, cataloged, and filed beneath the grander ledger of inevitability.

His chest burned when he drew breath. His limbs throbbed dully in their sockets, nerves fraying like old wiring. The sickness was no longer a guest—it was a tenant, sinking deeper with each passing week.

And yet… and yet, the mind remained sharp.

Sharper, perhaps, than ever before. As though each sliver of mortality surrendered to the disease had been transmuted into furious brilliance in the brain that refused to rest. That coil in his hand—a fragment of something greater—had come to him in a fever dream hours before the collapse. A key, he believed, to bypass the limits of flesh entirely.

But flesh would not wait. Flesh was failing.

Viktor pressed the coil to his palm, willing the ache away, though his fingers trembled with the effort.

"Stupid," he whispered hoarsely to no one, voice rasping against the sterile quiet. "Stupid to have—pushed so hard—without accounting for—"

His throat caught. He coughed, a thin spray of crimson freckling his wrist.

"—without accounting for time."

The irony tasted bitter. He had dedicated himself to the betterment of life, to bridging the gap between Zaun and Piltover, between suffering and salvation—and now the span between each breath felt like an ocean.

Footsteps echoed down the hallway, measured and soft. The nurses again, perhaps, with their bland reassurances and tasteless broth. He would refuse it, as he always did. There was no time for comfort. Only work. Only—

His thoughts wavered.

The coil slipped from his fingers and clinked softly against the tray beside him. He closed his eyes, temples damp with fevered sweat. The room seemed to tilt, shadows lengthening against the cold tiles.

Through the hum of distant machinery, Viktor became dimly aware of something different. A presence at the threshold. Not the nurse. Not a colleague. Something quieter, yet weightier. The faintest scent of earth and strange herbs accompanied it, cutting through the chemical pall.

Viktor did not open his eyes. Speech felt like lifting iron. But he spoke, because it was his nature to greet the unknown.

"Unless you have…a cure for time itself," he rasped, lips curling faintly, "I fear…you are wasting yours."

The breath caught painfully in his chest. His next words trembled, a murmur beneath the sound of the monitor’s steady beep.

"But if you do…"

Viktor opened one eye, gold and dimmed with weariness, "…I am listening."