Chapter Text
War never changes.
In the months following the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, the Mojave stood alone.
The NCR marched home to lick its wounds, its dreams of empire left to rot beneath the desert sun. Caesar’s Legion shattered, its banners burning across the Colorado. And high above New Vegas, the Lucky 38’s lights flickered for the last time, the man in the tower gone.
The one who made it all happen, the Courier, walked away. No crown. No army. No glory. Just the road, and the dust, and the weight of too many choices.
They say she headed east, into the long shadows of a dead America. Through ruins and radiation, through storms that stripped flesh from bone. Some called it madness. Others called it a pilgrimage.
No one knows where she went. Some say she found peace. Others whisper she saw something else, a place where the laws of the wasteland don’t reach.
But one truth endures, carried on every cracked radio and caravan tale:
The Courier walked into legend.
And the world has never been the same since.
The Connecticut sky didn’t burn with the familiar radioactive orange of the Mojave when Luz Noceda stepped onto the shattered remains of an old road leading toward a small town.
It was crazy to think she’d walked for four months just because she could. Well partly. The other reason was that she was, so to speak, a legend. Or at least the kind of name people whispered around campfires when the nights stretched too long.
Her boots crunched over cracked asphalt littered with bottle caps and the brittle bones of a long-dead world. The wind carried the dry smell of ozone, dirt, and brahmin dung.
Her NCR Ranger combat armor, sun-faded but still polished to a stubborn sheen, caught the last streaks of sunset. The duster was gone for now, folded in her pack, its edges worn thin by years of dust storms and firefights. Instead, she wore a weathered brown leather jacket lined with scavenged plating, its seams hand-stitched and reinforced with brahmin hide. It wasn’t standard issue anymore; it was Luz’s issue.
Her helmet still bore the iconic red lenses of the Rangers, though the right side had taken a bullet long ago. The impact left a neat puncture just above the temple, and in faded white chalk, someone (her) had drawn a crooked arrow pointing to it with the words: Benny was here: a reminder, a joke, and a promise, all in one.
Her gear was patched, scarred, and scavenged, but every mark told a story, every dent was a choice she’d lived through. Luz adjusted the strap of her Survivalist Rifle and kept walking, the Mojave sun behind her and a world she didn’t yet understand ahead.
The rifle’s stock was engraved with crude drawings of smiling cartoon cats around the original carving: ARRÊT! (French for “stop!”) At her hip rested Lucky, her engraved .357 revolver, the familiar weight riding in a holster patched from brahmin leather.
She adjusted her helmet and hummed a tune she half-remembered. Something about Big Iron. Or maybe Rocket 69.
(Brain injuries made playlists fuzzy.)
A bent road sign loomed out of the mist.
Welcome to Gravesfield, Connecticut, it read except someone had scratched “DON’T” over “Welcome” in jagged knife strokes.
“Don’t welcome me, huh? Joke’s on you,” Luz chirped, kicking a pebble. Her voice echoed oddly through the helmet’s respirator. “I go everywhere unwelcome!”
The town was still. Too still. Luz knew better than to trust stillness.
She unscrewed the cap of her battered Vault 13 canteen and took a swig. Then chittering. Three Radroaches burst from beneath a collapsed storefront.
Three squeezes of Lucky’s trigger.
Three wet pops.
Silence again.
“Huh. Must be a ghost town,” she muttered, reloading. “Maybe still has some good loot.”
She holstered Lucky, pulling a machete from her pack instead. No sense wasting ammo. She looted as she moved, empty shelves, dust-choked counters, the usual. Until she found the library.
She hadn’t expected much. Maybe a Tales of a Junktown Jerky Vendor, if she was lucky. But when she saw it on the shelf, her heart nearly stopped.
The Good Witch Azura.
Pristine.
Luz ran forward, fingers trembling as she reached for the cover. Books this intact were myths, pages missing, ink faded, spines chewed through by time. It had taken her three years to piece together the third Azura book. And now this? Whole. Untouched.
“Holy crap, holy crap!” she gasped, sure her eyes were lying. They weren’t.
She clutched the book to her chest and bolted from the library, dust swirling around her boots.
For the first time in months, Luz Noceda smiled beneath her helmet.
Luz sat down beside an old bus stop, setting The Good Witch Azura on a scrap of clean cloth she’d scavenged somewhere along the road. Her backpack hit the ground with a soft thud, and she dug out a can of Cram. The fine dining of wanderers everywhere.
She took off her helmet to eat. Her choppy, shoulder-length dark brown hair, sun-bleached at the tips, framed a face that had seen too many sunrises and firefights. It was the kind of uneven haircut that said “scissors were optional.” Her brown eyes still carried that sparkle (curiosity, mischief, wonder), but behind it lingered something new. A heaviness. The kind of quiet ache that came from watching too many good things die.
And the scar. Small, but unmistakable. The kind that made people flinch when they noticed it.
Still, she smiled. Not because things were okay, but because someone had to. Someone had to believe there was still something worth smiling for in a world that had forgotten how.
As she chewed, she glanced at her gloves and laughed under her breath. They didn’t match. One was the Pip-Boy glove, metallic, fingerless, with a dial to adjust the wrist-mounted device. The other was from her NCR Ranger set, but years of wear had left it riddled with holes. The pointer finger was completely gone now, sacrificed to practicality.
Her backpack wasn’t much better patched, stitched, and barely holding together, but it did its job. Nothing fell out, and that was good enough.
Connecticut was nothing like the Mojave. Greener, quieter, less irradiated. She couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. She’d heard rumors about Boston, something called the Minutemen. Maybe she’d check it out someday. But first, she had a book to read.
Except… when she turned back, The Good Witch Azura was gone.
“What the-?” Luz shot to her feet, scanning the area. It didn’t make sense. Nobody would steal a book. Except… her. Yeah, that tracked.
Then she saw it.
An owl. A normal owl. Not glowing, not two-headed, not hissing acid. Just… an owl. It stared back at her with unnervingly intelligent eyes. And slung around its body was a small bag. With her book.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Luz muttered. “Okay, little buddy, let’s not do anything crazy.”
The owl blinked. Then it turned and sprinted off.
“Hey, wait!” Luz shouted, scrambling for her gear. She jammed her helmet back on, grabbed her pack, and took off after it. “Tiny trash thief!”
The owl was faster than anything that small had a right to be. Luz chased it through cracked streets and overgrown yards until it darted into a shack on the outskirts of town. A brilliant flash of light erupted from inside, reflecting off the rusted metal door.
Luz stopped short. “Huh. Definitely not normal. Probably not safe. Smells… alive?”
Her Pip-Boy crackled with static. Then it flatlined.
She grinned beneath her helmet. “Cool! New biome unlocked.”
Without hesitation (because hesitation was for people with fully intact frontal lobes), Luz slung her rifle forward, tightened the strap on Lucky’s holster, and stepped through the door.
The smell of sulfur hit her nose before her feet even touched the ground.
Heat rolled across her armor in a sudden wave.
“¿Qué fue eso? Whoa…” Luz blinked, eyes wide behind her helmet. The air shimmered like summer asphalt.
She was standing in what looked like a storage area or maybe a hoarder’s den. Crates, trinkets, and junk were piled everywhere. Except… it wasn’t a room at all. It was a tent. A massive one. And the door she’d just come through stood upright in the middle of the floor, unsupported by anything.
When she pushed it, it didn’t budge.
“I thought I’d seen a lot of weird stuff,” she muttered, picking up a creepy little doll with a crown. “But this? This is impressive.”
“Aah, finally you’re back,” came a voice. Female, sharp, and impatient.
Luz froze. She stuffed the doll into her bag, crouched low, and crept toward the tent flap.
Outside, she spotted a tall woman with wild gray hair, wearing a green-and-yellow spotted bandana and a tattered red dress. The owl from before landed at her feet, dropped its sack, and flapped up to perch on a wooden staff. The woman twisted the staff, and the owl instantly stiffened into wood.
Luz’s breath caught.
Magic? Actual magic?
The woman began rummaging through the sack, tossing items aside one by one.
“Garbage.” (A telephone top.)
“Garbage.” (A diamond ring.)
“Garbage.” (Wait, was that the Holy Grail?)
Then the woman pulled out a pair of ridiculous slinky glasses and grinned. “Ah, now this will make me rich.”
Luz clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh.
Luz grinned under her helmet. “Fashion icon, got it.”
But her amusement died when the woman lifted something else from the bag.
The Good Witch Azura.
“And this,” the woman said, holding it over a candle flame, “will make good kindling.”
Luz didn’t think. She moved.
“Excuse me, sorry, that’s mine, thank you!” she blurted, darting forward and snatching the book out of the woman’s hands.
She spun toward the door, but before she could reach it, the door folded up like paper, snapping into a briefcase that zipped across the room and landed neatly in the woman’s grip.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the stranger said, slipping off the glasses.
Gold eyes met Luz’s visor. A golden fang glinted when she spoke.
Luz blinked. “...Okay. Not human.”
The woman wasn’t a ghoul (too clean, too alive), but the white skin, eyes, and teeth said she definitely wasn’t from around here.
Okay, Luz, she told herself. You’re in a tight spot. Probably about to be eaten or sold. No pressure. Just be normal.
Luz straightened, cocked her head, and let her visor catch the candlelight.
“Hi!” she chirped. “I’m Luz. I got shot in the head once. Wanna trade?”