LoL Universe Indexing and Search

Within the dark seams of Runeterra, the demon Evelynn searches for her next victim. She lures in prey with the voluptuous façade of a human female, but once a person succumbs to her charms, Evelynn’s true form is unleashed. She then subjects her victim to unspeakable torment, gratifying herself with their pain. To the demon, these liaisons are innocent flings. To the rest of Runeterra, they are ghoulish tales of lust gone awry and horrific reminders of the cost of wanton desire.

Evelynn was not always a skilled huntress. She began eons ago, as something primordial, shapeless, and barely sentient. This nascent wisp of shadow existed, numb and unroused by any stimulation, for centuries. It might have remained so, had the world not been upended by conflict. The Rune Wars, as they would come to be known, brought an era of mass suffering the world had never known.

As people across Runeterra began to experience a vast array of pain, anguish, and loss, the shadow stirred. The nothingness it had known for so long had been replaced by the manic vibrations of an agonized world. The creature quivered with excitement.

As the Rune Wars escalated, the world’s torment grew so intense that the shadow felt as if it might burst. It drank in all of Runeterra’s pain, which it experienced as boundless pleasure. The sensation nourished the creature, and over time, it transformed into something more. It became a demon, a ravenous spiritual parasite that fed on the basest of human emotions.

When the wars finally ended, the world’s suffering waned, and the demon found itself growing desperate. The only pleasure it had ever known was born of other creatures’ misery. Without their pain, it felt nothing, just as it had in its earliest days.

If the world would not provide the suffering the demon needed to thrive, it would have to make its own. It needed to inflict pain on other beings so that it could experience that elation again.

At first, catching prey was a challenge for the demon. It could move undetected in its shadow form, but to touch a human, the creature needed to manifest as something tangible. It made several attempts to fashion a physical body from its shadow-flesh, but each result was more monstrous than the last, scaring off her prey.

The demon realized it needed a shape that was pleasing to humans, one that would not only lure them right into its claws, but would offer them ecstasy born of their own desires, so that their pain would be that much sweeter.

From the shadows, it began to study those it sought to prey upon. It tailored its flesh to their liking, learned to say what they wanted to hear, and to walk in a manner they found alluring.

In a matter of weeks, the demon had perfected her physique, leading dozens of enamored victims to be tortured to death at her hands. Though she relishes the exquisite pain of each of her victims, she always finds herself wanting more. Each human’s desires are so small, and they always expire too soon. Their pain, too fleeting to give her anything more than tiny morsels of pleasure, is just enough to tide her over to the next feeding.

She yearns for the day she can plunge the world into utter chaos, and she can return to an existence of pure, rapturous ecstasy.

An enigma to the spirit realm, as well as the mortal world, Shen belongs to neither. Although born to one of the most revered families of northern Navori, it was his father’s role as the Eye of Twilight that set his destiny in the Kinkou Order.

As the son of Great Master Kusho, he was immersed in the order’s culture, and its core tenets were as familiar to him as the Ionian sunset. He knew the necessity of Pruning the Tree, the determination of Coursing the Sun, but above all, he learned the wisdom of Watching the Stars. He meditated and studied throughout his childhood, and was considered exemplary by all his teachers.

His closest friend, the only one who could match him in practice bouts, was the young acolyte Zed. They grew up as brothers, often confiding in each other their personal hopes and dreams. Shen could turn to Zed for a fresh perspective on any matter, and the two became known as the Kinkou’s most promising students.

As their skills developed, Kusho brought them on dangerous missions, including a hunt for the Golden Demon plaguing the province of Zhyun. Their search took years, but Shen stayed committed even after uncovering countless gruesome murders. When they at last captured the “demon”, it was revealed to be Khada Jhin, a mere stagehand from a traveling theater. Instead of execution, Great Master Kusho ordered the criminal imprisoned.

Though he and Zed both thought the killer deserved heavier punishment, Shen accepted his father’s decision. He strived to emulate the Eye of Twilight’s dispassion, and so found himself failing to console a bitter and resentful Zed.

Even when Noxian invaders threatened the peace of the First Lands, Shen reluctantly supported Kusho’s inaction. But when Zed abandoned the Kinkou to join the fight, Shen stayed within the temple walls.

Many of the provinces were soon occupied by the enemy. Despite this, Shen focused on maintaining Ionia’s spiritual harmony. So it was, when he was far from home, he felt a jolting imbalance within the Kinkou Order—rushing back, he came upon the survivors of a bloody coup. From them, he learned Zed had raised acolytes of his own, and seized the temple.

Worst of all, Shen’s father had been slain by the man he once saw as kin.

Repressing his anguish, he led the remnants of the Kinkou to safety in the mountains. Shen took up his father’s spirit blade, as well as the title of Eye of Twilight. His role was not to seek vengeance, but to rebuild the order. Following the core tenets, he began to recruit and train others, hoping to restore its strength.

One acolyte in particular showed boundless potential. Shen taught the girl, Akali Jhomen Tethi, to master the arts of stealth and subterfuge. Her mother, Mayym, had stood alongside Kusho as the Fist of Shadow, and it seemed as though her daughter could follow the same path. Even so, Shen found himself forced to urge restraint whenever Akali would seek to strike back at their mortal foes.

When Noxus finally withdrew, many Ionians celebrated the victorious resistance. Others, like Shen, endured the consequences of war—he persisted in his duty, while in private he wrestled with his hatred for Zed, and doubt in his own ability to lead. The years of conflict had taken a heavy toll on the First Lands, and Shen was uncertain whether the rebuilt Kinkou would ever be able to redress the balance.

Indeed, even as Akali became the new Fist of Shadow, he felt her beginning to drift away. In time, she openly denounced his teachings, and left the order.

Shen meditated, watching the stars, and understood that Akali would need to find her own way… and so would the Kinkou.

Sometimes, between unseen struggles in the spirit realm, Shen still contemplates the value of his beliefs. He has never let his emotions stop him from preserving tradition, but the question remains: how long can one man walk two worlds, before the acts of one destroy the other?

The harbinger of oblivion, Karthus is an undying spirit whose haunting songs are a prelude to the horror of his nightmarish appearance. The living fear the eternity of undeath, but Karthus sees only beauty and purity in its embrace, a perfect union of life and death. When Karthus emerges from the Shadow Isles, it is to bring the joy of death to mortals, an apostle of the unliving.

Karthus was born into abject poverty in the sprawl of dwellings built beyond the walls of the Noxian capital. His mother died at the moment of his birth, leaving his father to raise him and his three sisters alone. They shared a crumbling, rat-infested almshouse with scores of other families, subsisting on a diet of rainwater and vermin. Of all the children, Karthus was the best ratter, and regularly brought gnawed corpses for the cook-pot.

Death was commonplace in the slums of Noxus, and many mornings began with the wailing of bereaved parents who woke to discover their child cold and lifeless beside them. Karthus learned to love these laments, and would watch, fascinated, as the tally-men of Kindred notched their staffs and bore the bodies from the almshouse. At night the young Karthus would sneak through the cramped rooms, seeking those whose lives hung by a thread, hoping to witness the moment their soul passed from life to death. For years, his nightly travels were fruitless, as it was impossible to predict exactly when a person would die. He was denied witnessing the moment of death until it reached his own family.

Outbreaks of disease were frequent in such cramped confines, and when Karthus’s sisters sickened with the plague, he watched over them intently. While his father drowned his grief, Karthus was the ever dutiful brother, caring for his sisters as the disease consumed them. He watched each of them as they died, and a sublime connection seemed to reach into him as the light faded from their eyes - a yearning to see what lay beyond death and unlock the secrets of eternity. When the tally-men came for the bodies, Karthus followed them back to their temple, asking them question after question about their order and the workings of death. Could a person exist at the moment where life ends, but before death begins? If such a liminal moment could be understood and held, might the wisdom of life be combined with the clarity of death?

The tally-men quickly recognized Karthus’s suitability for their order and he was inducted into their ranks, first as a digger of graves and pyre-builder, before ascending to the rank of corpse collector. Karthus guided his bone-cart around the streets of Noxus to gather the dead every day. His dirges quickly became known throughout Noxus, mournful laments that spoke to the beauty of death and the hope that what lay beyond was something to be embraced. Many a grieving family took solace in his songs, finding a measure of peace in his heartfelt elegies. Eventually, Karthus worked in the temple itself, tending to the sick in their final moments, watching as whatever death had laid its claim upon them took its due. Karthus would speak to each person laid before him, ushering their souls into death, in search of further wisdom in their fading eyes.

Eventually, Karthus reached the conclusion that he could learn no more from mortals, that only the dead themselves could answer his questions. None of the dying souls could tell of what lay beyond, but whispered rumors and tales told to frighten children echoed of a place where death was not the end - The Shadow Isles.

Karthus emptied the temple’s coffers and bought passage to Bilgewater, a city plagued by a strange black mist said to draw souls to a cursed island far out at sea. No captain was willing to take Karthus to the Shadow Isles, but eventually he came upon a rum-sodden fisherman with a mountain of debts and nothing to lose. The boat plied the ocean for many days and nights, until a storm drove them onto the rocks of an island that appeared on no charts. A black mist rolled out from a haunted landscape of gnarled trees and tumbled ruins. The fisherman freed his boat and turned its prow in terror for Bilgewater, but Karthus leapt into the sea and waded ashore. Steadying himself with his notched tally-staff, he proudly sang the lament he had prepared for the moment of his own death, and his words were carried on a cold wind to the heart of the island.

The black mist flowed through Karthus, ravaging his flesh and spirit with ancient sorcery, but such was the force of his desire to transcend mortality that it did not destroy him. Instead, it remade him, and Karthus was born anew in the waters of the island as a fleshless revenant.

Revelation filled Karthus as he became what he always believed he should have been; a being poised at the threshold of death and life. The beauty of this eternal moment filled him with wonder as the wretched spirits of the island rose to behold his transformation, drawn to his passion like predators scenting blood in the ocean. Finally, Karthus was where he belonged, surrounded by those who truly understood the boon undeath truly was. Filled with righteous zeal, he knew he had to return to Valoran and share his gift with the living, to free them from petty mortal concerns.

Karthus turned and the Black Mist bore him over the waves to the fisherman’s boat. The man fell to his knees before Karthus, begging for his life, and Karthus granted him the blessing of death, ending his mortal suffering and raising him up as an immortal spirit as he sang his lament for passing souls. The fisherman was the first of many such souls Karthus would free, and soon the Deathsinger would command a legion of unliving wraiths. To Karthus’s awakened senses, the Shadow Isles was in a state of apathetic limbo, where the blessings of death were squandered. He would galvanize the dead in a crusade to bring the beauty of oblivion to the living, to end the suffering of mortality and usher in a glorious age of undeath.

Karthus has become the emissary of the Shadow Isles, the herald of oblivion whose laments are paeans to the glory of death. His legions of unbound souls join with his funereal dirges, their haunting song reaching beyond the Black Mist to be heard on cold nights over graveyards and charnel houses all across Valoran.

Most would say that death isn't funny. It isn't, unless you're Shaco - then it's hysterical. He is Valoran's first fully functioning homicidal comic; he jests until someone dies, and then he laughs. The figure that has come to be known as the Demon Jester is an enigma. No one fully agrees from whence he came, and Shaco never offers any details on his own. A popular belief is that Shaco is not of Runeterra - that he is a thing from a dark and twisted world. Still others believe that he is the demonic manifestation of humanity's dark urges and therefore cannot be reasoned with. The most plausible belief is that Shaco is an assassin for hire, left to his own lunatic devices until his services are needed. Shaco certainly has proven himself to be a cunning individual, evading authorities at every turn who might seek him for questioning for some horrendous, law-breaking atrocity. While such scuttlebutt might reassure the native inhabitants of Valoran, it seems unimaginable that such a malevolent figure is allowed to remain at large.

Whatever the truth of his history might be, Shaco is a terrifying, elusive figure most often seen where madness can openly reign.

The waterways of Valoran are old, but far older still is the demon Tahm Kench. From muddy gambling tents along the Serpentine River, through the salt-crusted dice halls of Bilgewater, to the gilded wagering tables of Piltover and Zaun—all those who have given a covetous glance to another’s wealth know the unending hunger that comes from an encounter with the River King.

The first tales of the creature were told by a traveling people who plied the Serpentine. They warned of a giant fish with a cavernous mouth, who would lure in the dissatisfied with the promise of more. One such story was that of a young man renowned for his honesty. Though born to the ways of a raftsman, he desired a life beyond the poor banks he knew so well, and the River King promised him an unforgettable experience if only he would tell one little lie. It seemed harmless enough, so the raftsman bent the truth in conversation with his own brother. That night the demon appeared, revealing a fork in the river the raftsman had never noticed before. He followed it to a camp of foreign folk who offered him food and drink, and fresh companionship. As dawn neared, and the raftsman was full and ready to return to his people, the demon appeared again, promising an even greater experience for another lie. His interested piqued, the man accepted the bargain, telling falsehoods to his hosts. The river parted again and he followed it to an evening of even greater luxury. This continued, night after night, until the once-honest raftsman’s deceits came as easily as breathing.

When the river finally emptied into the sea, he found himself alone and lost—there was no one left to lie to. So many dark choices, all of them his own, had left the raftsman with no way back home.

The brackish rivers of the mainland carried the tales of the River King to the Blue Flame Isles, where the creature gained a name as his legend grew—Tahm Kench. In Bilgewater, fortunes are boom or bust, with as much wealth going out with the tide as comes in. Many a tavern yarn tells of ol’ Tahm, a demon of the water with an unending appetite for games of chance, such that the loquacious beast became a symbol for many of the city’s gambling dens and houses of sin.

Once the Sun Gates opened easy trade from Bilgewater to Piltover, tales of Tahm Kench became more common in the City of Progress and its underbelly, Zaun. There, children know Tahm as “Two-Coats,” a fish so monstrously large that he wears two fine jackets stitched together. With a jaunty top hat and a smile wider than the Pilt itself, he drives the jealousies of young artificers. It is said he came one Progress Day to a struggling Piltovan inventor, and offered her an idea certain to make a wealthy clan take notice. All he asked in return was a single lock of her hair. The ambitious woman made the trade and, true enough, her work landed her a lucrative contract. But one invention would not satisfy, and Two-Coats wandered by, this time asking for all of her lovely braids. Not wishing to disappoint her new patrons, the inventor agreed—and Two-Coats ate them up on the spot. Still the woman was unable to find the one great innovation that would make her name. The demon came again, offering a deal that would take the tip of one finger. The following week it was an ear. A year passed, and by then there was little left of the woman to give. Finally she called Two-Coats herself, begging him to make it all stop.

He laughed as he opened his jaws wide, telling her he would protect her from herself, and promptly swallowed her whole.

The River King. The Great Waddler. Old Yawn-Belly. Two-Coats. The demon Tahm Kench is known by many names, but all who speak them have learned a singular truth: no matter how alluring his words may be, in his mouth you will be lost.

Evelynn slinked through the teeming streets, the shadows of her body blending seamlessly with the night. Her eyes glinted within the gloom, though only the keenest observer would have noticed. Drunks, sailors, and harlots chatted in a nearby thoroughfare, blissfully unaware they were being watched by a demon in the dark. The demon, on the other hand, saw them all with perfect clarity, and judged them with the most discerning eye.

Evelynn’s gaze settled on a man lying in the gutter, a bottle of beet wine dangling from his hands. Ordinarily, the demon wouldn’t give a second thought to someone in his condition. But she had not fed in days, and she found herself desperate enough to consider the man, if only for a moment. It would be so easy. All she needed was to lure him to one of the numerous alleys far from the glow of the street lamps.

The thought perished as she watched a cockroach scurry across the drunk’s face. This was a man too inebriated to feel. His arousal would be vague and muted, with none of the urgent attraction she loved to see in her victims before she brought them low. She might even flay an entire arm before he mustered a scream.

And that was the problem. Over the course of countless feedings, Evelynn had learned everything about her palate: She preferred—no, needed—her victims to feel every prick, every bite, every bit of flesh she peeled away with her claws. A man in this condition would be dull and unfulfilling, scarcely worth her time.

She dismissed the drunk and continued down the muddy promenade, past the windows of a dank, candlelit tavern. A fat, belching woman threw open its door and stumbled out into the night, grasping a half-eaten turkey leg. For a moment, Evelynn considered the woman, how she might woo her into an embrace, and then into the unspeakable hell that would follow.

The demon watched as the woman wolfed down the rest of the meat, never tasting it. There was something deep inside her, a melancholy that would taint the experience.

Evelynn preferred inflicting the pain herself.

The demon moved on, gliding through the shadows of the town, over two more drunks, past a beggar asking for alms, between a couple in the midst of an argument. Evelynn found them all completely unappealing. Hurting them would be like plucking a flower that had already wilted. She preferred her daisies tall and healthy, for those were the most satisfying to cut down.

A dreadful thought overtook her. Perhaps she’d made a mistake choosing this wretched backwater as her hunting ground. Perhaps, at any moment, the thrill from her last victim might wear off, leaving only the nothingness—that utterly empty space inside her where feelings should be.

And then, she saw him…

The gentleman was positively beaming as he exited one of the high-end pubs. He was dapper without being flashy, and he hummed a jaunty tune to himself as he set off down the street with a bouquet of flowers tucked gingerly in the fold of his arm.

The two lashers on Evelynn’s back writhed with excitement. Even from a distance, she sensed this man was completely content in his own skin. She dashed after the gentleman, taking great care not to lose track of her prey or to alert him to her presence.

He walked for nearly half an hour before finally turning up a long walkway toward a modestly sized, cut-stone manor. At the end of the path, the man stepped through the heavy oak door to his home. Evelynn held her unblinking gaze on the windows of the man’s house as they lit one by one with warm candlelight. A slender, austere woman in a high-necked evening gown entered and greeted the man with a welcoming embrace. She feigned a slight surprise at the flowers he had brought, before placing them in a clean vase, right next to an old bouquet.

The demon’s interest grew.

A moment later, two children, scarcely out of diapers, ran into the room and threw their arms around the man’s legs, their wide grins sparkling with tiny teeth. Though the scene played like the epitome of domestic bliss, Evelynn knew what she would find if she probed just a little deeper.

She waited patiently, watching the candles go out one by one, until only the parlor remained lit. The man was alone, settling into a reading chair to draw on his pipe. Evelynn crept out of the shadows, her dark, wispy limbs giving way to warm flesh. Her demonic lashers disappeared behind her back, revealing a shapely female form, with curves too generous for any eye to ignore.

Her hips waggled softly as she sauntered across the lawn to the window. She was nearly arm’s length from the glass when she saw the man bolt upright from his chair at the sight of her, his pipe nearly falling from his mouth. Evelynn beckoned with a single finger, motioning for the man to join her outside.

The man crept to the front door and opened it tentatively, curious to investigate the strange beauty lurking outside his window. He approached her on the lawn with great apprehension, and greater anticipation.

“Who… are you?” he asked timidly.

“I’m whatever you want me to be,” assured the demon.

As Evelynn locked eyes with the man, she plumbed the depths of his soul and found exactly what she was looking for—that tiny lesion of discontent that festered within even the happiest person.

There it is, she thought. All that he wants and cannot have.

“My family…” the man said, unable to finish his thought.

The demon leaned close.

“Shh. It’s okay,” she whispered in the man’s ear. “I know what you want, and the guilt you feel for wanting it. Let it go.”

She pulled back to find the man hopelessly captivated.

“Can I… have you?” he asked, ashamed of his brazenness, but overcome by a strange desire to take her right there on the lawn.

“Of course, honey. That’s why I’m here,” said the demon.

He touched her face with the tips of his fingers, caressing her cheek. She held his hand firmly to her skin and released a soft, sultry chuckle. This sweet, tender, happy man would be hers tonight. He had so much pain to give, and she would take it all.

From behind them, the shuffling of slippered feet sounded from the open doorway of the house.

“Is everything okay, love?” asked the man’s wife.

“Everything’s going to be wonderful, my darling,” the demon answered for the dumbstruck man.

The deal had become even sweeter, and the prospects more enticing. There was one daisy in full flower to pluck, and one bulb to bloom while it watched.

Sivir watches leaves fall outside her window, and sips tea flavored with rose petals. The liquid dances gently across her tongue. Its petals are delicate, pink, and soft. The air is still, and the sky is gray, and beneath Sivir’s thatch floor lies hard earth, grounding her upon a single and unnassailable reality.

It is the dirt and the grass and the homes and the villagers she has been accustomed to for the majority of her life—here, in her small dining room, in her small cottage, in the small village of Sugiru. The world, she believes, cannot be a mirror. It is rigid. Concrete.

Sivir’s world is a reflection of nothing.

She avoids looking at the corner of the room.

There is an object there, now. Perhaps it was there before. Perhaps it will be there tomorrow. A golden ring of immaculate, intricate design—or a monstrous wheel whose spokes are sharpened to a wire-thin killing edge. It is a compass, a star, a weapon, a key. It was buried once, someone told her, and now it is not.

Hours pass between Sivir and the golden ring. She drinks tea flavored with rose petals, her cup never emptying as it rises and falls from her lips. Day never breaks, and the leaves outside her window never cease to fall. Hours become days. Days become years. Sivir grounds herself in her small dining room, in her small cottage, in a small village on a tiny island far out to sea, her vision locked in place, her muscles screaming.

Sivir steals a glance at the corner of the room. The ring has begun to widen.

Every synapse in her body freezes. The wheel’s empty center collapses into an ocean of liquid night. Framed with gold, a starless nothing stretches outward beyond an infinite, black horizon. An old fisherman, his shape stark within the ring’s abyss, awaits Sivir’s living eyes as they rise to meet his own. He grins, his mouth blooming into hundreds of teeth.

The fisherman turns to cast his spear into space, each step ponderous, and the needle arcs endlessly upward, then down beneath the surface of glistening, obsidian waters. The ring continues to expand as ichor pours from its center. It fills the room, it fills the cottage, it bursts from the windows and doors. The ring slices into the roof of Sivir’s home, cutting the building’s facade from its foundation, cutting the cliff face it is stood on from the island itself. As she crashes into the sea, Sivir is reflected against the absence of nothing beneath her, the nothing all around her, and she watches the fisherman as his line catches on something, deep below their feet.

Steadily, surely, he begins to drag it towards them.

Sivir runs her finger across the edge of the golden ring. There is no pain as the cut opens, merely a sigh, a release. Sivir studies her blood as it sinks into the metal—a deep, blossoming vermillion that seems to stretch along its surface, down its labyrinthine engravings towards the ever-spreading emptiness at its center. The ring retracts; the portal closes, and the darkness burbles meekly before it is banished.

Sivir drinks tea flavored with rose petals, and watches the leaves outside her window. The clouds begin to dissipate as morning turns to day, and the trees slowly settle against the wind. Blood is smeared along the side of her cup. Black fluid trails along her floor.

It is three days before the rise of the blood moon, and a pair of twin girls has vanished along the beach at night. The day stretches. Sivir remembers how the elders wailed, how their cries punctured the evening air, and how their elaborate burial rites filled the waves with sputtering paper lanterns—an old tradition intended to guide lost souls home. The girls’ bodies were never recovered.

Sivir watches the ring as it rests against the corner of her home.

It is silent. Sated, for now.

It took Sivir hours to dig the ring out of the woods. She hadn’t even known to stop until it almost cut her hand in half, its gleaming edge jutting from the foot of an old stone. When she looked up the day had fully passed, and it wasn’t clear how or why she had found herself there.

Sivir took it into the village, maybe? It is hard to recall. Her memories seem distant, unfamiliar, as though they rest at the bottom of a clear lake she can’t breach. Sivir takes the ring to the other side of the island and buries it with sand. Sivir takes the ring to the sea throws it in.

The ring always returns. Resting quietly against the dusty corner of her home, hungrily awaiting only her. And when Sivir gazes into it, the ring opens again and again, the old fisherman locking eyes with her against a still, atramentous midnight, and he begins to pull some nameless horror up from the bottom of the world.

Sometimes Sivir thinks she is dead. She rubs her thumb along the matching shell bracelets in her pocket in those moments—each one small and delicate—and finds in some half-remembered nightmare a pair of girls, hand-in-hand, drifting crimson against the moonlit sea.

Sivir lives on a coastal road overlooking a small archipelago, on the far edge of a quiet island. She is remote enough from Sugiru to enjoy respite from its daily squabbles, and close enough to be accepted as a part of its community. When Sivir looks over the cliffs she sees herself smashed against the rocks below. A different Sivir will look up from the beach, her hands black with the blood of hundreds of people.

Sivir awakens on a bed made of cotton and straw, on the second day before the rise of the blood moon. She peers down the hall at still another Sivir, clutching the golden ring so tightly that her fingers hang by fleshy threads. Her free hand carries a horned, wooden half-mask emblazoned with the visage of a demon, and she begins to place it over her face. Sivir closes her eyes, and when she opens them she is alone.

Sivir’s memories often overlap. Great lengths of time vanish behind her, and recently she has begun to find herself standing outdoors, gazing upwards at a blank and yawning sky. She walks through the village and greets its inhabitants; she walks through the forest and savors its quiet. She looks at her feet and finds the lacerated skull of a man she saw only an hour before, but when she shakes herself awake he stands in front of her at the harborside, brow furrowed in concern. Sivir imagines her hands wrapping around his neck, and ripping his throat out with her teeth.

Her fingers stretch and bend, her bones piercing through flesh in blighted indigos and reds. Great horns burst from her skull; her skin cracks apart as the chrysalis of her mortal body finally gives in, finally gives way to the true body beneath, and she howls through her single flaming eye as sad, small creatures run for safety. She moves against the turning of the world, her feet pounding across time as serrated claws cut through tiny, gnawing, pleading things. She peels the walls off a building and falls upon the craven figures inside, drinking in their screams as thick rivers of blood pour past her monstrous shadow and into the sea.

Sivir finds herself suddenly on the beach, rubbing dead girls’ shell bracelets between her fingers.

The night creeps in softly. Moment by moment, the sun’s rays vanish beneath a blanket of cold stars, and Sivir stands before the black static of the ocean, its lightless waves roiling against her reflectionless mirror world.

The fisherman’s spear sings across a vast emptiness. Light and sound fail as he casts his line, its heft sinking down into the bottomless chasm above which he stands. His is a sea without end, twin reflections of an infinite nihility, the grave of a lost and nameless epoch. He smiles with the hunger of an ancient shark.

His hook sticks fast, and he begins to pull a great shape up from far below.

Inch by inch, second by second, a mountainous silhouette emerges from beyond the edges of the fisherman’s black horizon. It is a tower, a fortress, a sun; thick ichor sloughs from it without end, a great wall of impenetrable darkness dragged along from some forgotten pelagic abyss. The spear tears loose from the object’s surface, a wooden mask impaled along its tip.

One day before the night of the blood moon, Sivir places the mask over her face.

Sivir is Sivir, and Sivir is not.

In the red light of the blood moon, Sivir walks the paths of a long-deserted Sugiru, clutching the golden ring in one hand, and a mask in the other. Her muscles twitch at the slightest sound. Her organs pop unnaturally, pebbles washed smooth by the timeless advance of a biological sea.

All around her are bodies. A thousand broken dolls, their arms outstretched in hideous ecstasy, frozen in some grotesque invocation of long-absent patrons, house gods, and ancestor spirits. These victims are a delicate garden—these offerings, their curled palms, are the blossoms of a dark and sumptuous harvest given in the name of entities too terrible to understand. Some aren’t completely dead, and their fingers grasp gently at nothing.

The blood moon descends.

It is larger than Sivir imagined it—too large, looming as a great crimson sphere over her lost and rudderless island. It casts no reflection against the sea, for it has no equal; it shadows the true moon and devours it whole, its hunger colossal, unending, unquenched.

Sivir drops the wooden mask and the golden ring. She falls to her knees beneath this mirrored cradle, its center a bounding main of beating wings and boiling, rippling blood. A great figure stirs within: the lone demonic progeny of humanity’s twinned soul, a great demon in the shape of a man, sliding from his womb of light as the moon’s embryonic shell breaks open. The massive figure falls into the waves—a wicked blade in his hand, wings flapping with the sound of cracking glaciers. Buried once, and now not.

Briefly, Sivir imagines the leaves outside her window, and tea flavored with rose petals, and a small cottage on a small island that seems now so, so small. She imagines the girls by the sea, their shattered bodies floating past the reflection of some pale, inadequate pretender, and the dark whispers of an ancient, unnameable thing, standing before her in the bloodstained night.

She raises her head, and imagines the world as a mirror.

The moon caresses Sivir’s two faces, and envelops them.

“You the marshal?” the river man said, his features an unreadable patina of lowland dust and dried bottlebrush needles, caked together by mud from the bottom of an old lakebed. He stood in the doorway of Lucian's private train cabin, small and large at the same time, dressed in gold-panning rags that had been picked from a dead claim jumper on the outskirts of Progress.

The river man didn't breathe in or out. Didn't have to.

Lucian had heard about them before, the river men, but never seen one up close. They needed moisture or they'd dry out, never venturing far from the mudholes and gulches they spawned in. If a traveler was unlucky enough they’d try to fill a flask with a river man's putrid water, or dig a pan into the silt where one lived. Without warning, it would snap up like an alligator, pulling you into the suffocating muck with wide, earthen arms, and just like that you were gone. Another ghost of the Old West.

“Not anymore,” said Lucian.

Lucian looked at the river man and the river man looked back, the gunslinger comfortably resting against the floral draperies of his cabin. Flecks of light occasionally entered through the curtains as their train rattled along, illuminating the river man's dark, piscine eyes, nearly hidden beneath the earthen cracks in his face.

“I want your badge,” he said.

Lucian nodded. A federal's badge would get the thing past Fort Nox, away from its government monster hunters, and down by way of caravan to the mangrove swamps just south of Bandle. Probably thought it could take up shop there, now that more and more east coasters were settling the low desert. Didn't make the creature's gamble less desperate, but Lucian appreciated when the stakes were clear.

“Must not be many of you left,” said Lucian.

“Ain't too many of anything left,” said the river man.

The boxcar's springs clicked once as they compressed against a couplet of uneven rail lines, and in the instant that the cabin shifted, the river man spread his arms wide, the mud on his face giving way to dozens of needle-sharp teeth as great spines burst from his shoulders. Before the springs clicked again a gunshot rang out, a thin ray of hellfire erupting through the side of the train and into the setting sun, and before the river man hit the floor Lucian's sidearm was already back in its holster.

The creature's head, split down the center and burnt beyond recognition, smoldered with the faint scent of sulfur and blackthorn. Its body contorted on the ground, flame roasting its membranes from the inside, and Lucian straightened his hat as he leaned back into the darkness of his room. The darkness shuddered softly around him, and smiled.

No one came to check on Lucian. No one came to take the dessicated body of the river man. The two traveled in silence together, door open, all the way down to the last stop at Angel's Perch.

And then out to the preacher who spoke with the dead.

Progress had been alive with whispers that this was the lawman what tangled with the devil and lost, and now he was headed up to New Eden to meet with the holy reverend. Both were ill portents in the Old West, so nobody would deny the aims of the man with the grinning shadow. They didn't need another Twin Reeds or Redriver, entire towns swallowed up and gone with some foul twist of happenstance. They needed Lucian out of their settlement and fast, and would give him anything he needed with all speed.

This had been the game ever since his last job with the federals, when they'd sent him out to reckon with the devil himself and drag him back to civilization. They would ‘put the devil on trial’—or that was the play, at least—and prove to the world that the frontier was safe to claim.

Of course, Lucian knew there wasn't just one devil, but the public thought better in singulars. He’d seen how the desert was crawling with strange creatures from every end of the world: demons in clean pressed suits, angels holed up in mountain crags, witches and ghosts and all manner of beast that might cloak itself in moonlight and tear an unsuspecting pilgrim to ribbons. The western natives and their alien weaponry; the skull-faced colossi who fed on ripened flesh; the mechanical men built by human hands, long gone rogue. And always, always devils.

This devil, though, was different. He went by many names—The Reaper, The Slaughter God, Old Turnkey, and Great Horn. He collected souls, or so the stories said, and went from town to town conducting his dark business, tearing the spirits out of the living and leaving their flayed skins behind. A creature of the Old World and demon of the wild frontier who, like his kin, sated his terrible hungers on an endless river of fresh-faced pioneers. Enough so that folks were starting to take notice, and for a government aimed on expansion, folks taking notice was bad for business.

Three marshals were dead at his hands, all told. Lucian had known two of them.

“They call it Thresh,” his handlers revealed. “Think you can catch him?”

Lucian looked over the sketches, noting the monster’s brazen, bovine skull, alight with the flames of all seven hells. He figured the lantern hanging curiously nearby was the source of its power, and if he could get in a clean shot, the fight would be over before it started.

Yet it was never that easy with devils, especially devils with a federal bodycount. He remembered tangling with a particularly nasty specimen near Chuparosa that moved with the speed of a desert storm, kicking up whirlwinds as it went. It was too fast to hit with a bullet, and if it hadn’t been for the timely intervention of his partner, Lucian might not have made it out alive. This hunt required backup.

“Not alone,” said Lucian. “I’ll need Senna.”

“Last stop, Angel’s Perch,” the conductor uttered, so gently it was almost a whisper. The heat of the journey had shriveled the river man’s corpse nearly into rawhide, but in the long shadows of the cabin a worse creature had perched itself upon Lucian’s seat.

It was smoke and fire, teeth and flames, its arms the artillery of a demon general cast up from the bottom of the abyss. It had the rough shape of a man, were a man made from campfire ash, with the glowing sigil of the federal marshals inverted upon its breast. Its legs were the incinerated spires of ancient, burning elms. Its red heart pulsed with the rage of all the earth.

“God,” spoke the conductor, not knowing which god he was invoking. The thing stood on its curious, spindling legs, leaning against the train’s still air. Its face seemed to peel apart, mouth broken in horrific ecstasy, as hellfire illuminated a ragged, mocking grin.

In that moment the ash fell away, and Lucian stepped out from the darkness.

“Sorry, friend,” he spoke. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

The conductor quivered in silence for a long while before Lucian brushed past, down the steel halls of the cabin car and out into the twilit evening. He figured the man would make a good story of it.

Angel’s Perch. A boomtown at the edge of civilization, where the trees grew tall and the air was thick with the scent of honey and wine. No one knew what lay beyond the ring of gargantuan pines at the foot of the mountains west of town, but they did know they had enough guns and men to hold off anything the far frontier could throw at them. Or at least they assumed. The creatures who made a home of Angel’s Perch would only reveal so much about what lay beyond, and no other living thing what had ventured that far west had returned sane, or at all.

Lucian made his way through the Perch’s bustling train station and into the center of town, past no less than three snake oil salesmen, each hucking the artificial magic ointments of the industrial east, and a saloon girl with the body of a cobra. Her milky eyes were hidden behind a veil, lest a paying customer turn to granite before they ever sat down to drink.

Near the mouth of main street, beyond the loggers and lamplighters, the general stores and the brothels, and the reclusive gunsmith rumored to be a fallen deity, there stood the town’s famed saloon. Popular myth held it had been in business since the founding of the settlement, or perhaps even before. It was called The Earthly King: be you man, woman or beast with a fate to outrun, its kingdom was open to you… as long as you had cash to spare.

It was, in many ways, the kind of place where a man might lose himself. But Lucian didn’t have much of himself left to lose, always feeling the tug of invisible strings against the weight of his soul, the shadow grinning behind him. He couldn’t stay for long.

Humans had little knowledge of settlements in the far west, and creatures living in town wouldn’t spill their precious secrets without a fight. The natives, if they spoke at all, would never reveal anything about anything, the few who tolerated settlers busying themselves with their strange machines.

Lucian had to rely on friends. Most could have been counted among the federal marshals, but they didn’t take kindly to demons, and like it or not that was what Lucian was fast becoming. He had to reach even further back, before the government contracts and the cobblestone streets of St. Zaun, to his days as a brash young gunfighter for hire. There he’d met many friends who lived and died with a revolver in their hand, but one figure remained as steadfast and obstinate as always, too big to kill and too old to die. He wasn’t a man per se, but he’d been fighting long before the first ships landed on the continent, and would probably be fighting long after everything else was dust and whispers.

Lucian stepped through the wide-set doors of the King and, for a moment, the bar grew quiet as its unsightly patrons sized up the harrowed stranger. “I’m looking for the longhorn,” he said, and they at once turned back to their card games and beer, the high shrill of an out of tune piano crashing against a dozen incomprehensible hoots and hollers.

Lucian soon spotted the longhorn at the far end of the bar—his massive bulk was hard to miss, even amid the carousing of the King’s clientele. Despite his frame he liked to keep to himself, though it was not uncommon for cocky young fighters to call him out over some perceived slight, hoping to down the beast for fame and glory. This never ended well, and more nights than not a boisterous challenger would have their skull pulverized with a single, swift butt to the head.

Alistar was a minotaur, easily ten feet tall and six feet wide. If you picked a fight with him, you got what was coming.

“Longhorn,” said Lucian.

“Marshal,” replied Alistar.

“I’m making my way to New Eden,” said Lucian.

“Aren’t we all,” replied Alistar, as Lucian sat beside him.

Alistar was old, now—few of his kind remained, and he would no doubt outlive them all. He spent his days as a glorified thug for other, weaker creatures, and his nights on a bar stool built for beings half his size.

The pair gazed solemnly ahead. Not a man came to Angel’s Perch without a reason, and fewer still walked through the doors of The Earthly King unless that reason was dire. It was the drinking hole of renegades and dead men, a drain where the aimless slowly circled downward, and those seeking a final battle spilled their coin before vanishing into the wilderness.

Lucian was heading deep into the uncharted northwest, where no trains ran and vicious gods walked among the trees, seeking a rumor on borrowed time.

Both knew the stakes, and the favor, though none had been asked.

“What do you think she’ll say?” asked Alistar. “When you get there.”

“I don’t know,” answered Lucian. “I don’t rightly know.”

The longhorn sighed into his drink, a thick aluminum tankard about the size of a child. He never had liked long goodbyes.

“Let me draw you a map.”

Lucian had first met Senna at the end of a gun—her gun—during a bloody shootout in one of Buzzard Gulch’s most squalid drinking parlors. Not that shootouts in Buzzard Gulch were uncommon, but this one had involved some fool bounty hunter drawing on an Outsider with his back turned. It got ugly.

The Outsiders, so they claimed, were from everywhere and nowhere at once, creatures in clean pressed suits whose love of gambling had made them infamous among outlaw clans and desperate homesteaders. Beating one meant riches beyond compare, conjured from nothing and guaranteed by an Outsider’s wax seal—itself worth a small fortune. Losing was another matter, as they accepted no wager less than a man’s most deeply cherished possession. Farms, watches, children, souls… a favorite knife—the bet was always steep, even if you didn’t know it yet.

Rumor had it this specimen had beaten Jeremiah James, a millionaire railroad baron Lucian had once done small jobs for. Jeremiah was a giant, and a mean one at that, who’d posted a sky-high bounty the moment he lost whatever dire prize he so foolishly put up for collateral—enough to bankrupt him twice over.

And as almost every gunfighter knew, once a reward swung out of the piss-pot, gully stabbing, prairie-shotgun-ambush fare of Buzzard Gulch’s wanted board and into the realm of jilted industrialists, bounty hunters would come calling. The whole lot of them loved money and killing, and not much else.

The hunter drew with little warning, and instantly the room went quiet. The Outsider sipped his whiskey with a calm that suggested the absence of all intent. Senna, a handful of federal marshals and the longhorn were present, among the town’s usual collection of heavily armed scoundrels and murderers. Everyone waited to make a move.

“Now, friend,” the hunter cooed, her voice sugar tinged with blood, “I know you’ve got what I came for. Turn it over, and everybody walks out the way they came in.”

The Outsider said nothing—his face was as placid as a porcelain doll, unmoved and unperturbed by the threat of his assailant’s twin six-guns. He’d known she was coming the whole time. Probably knew before she even took the job. But in the heat of the low sun, plied with drink at the edge of the world, it was hard to tell who was itching for a fight, and who was just bluffing.

The hunter broke the silence with a bullet, and a heavy round exploded from her pistol and into the center of the creature’s chest. The Outsider’s body billowed outward, the hole rippling black smoke in the shape of crows, and from the smoky mass a great, vicious claw burst into a table of poker players. Cards, chips, and searing blood sprayed across the room as the hunter started unloading.

Lucian drew on the hunter, the marshals drew on Lucian, and the longhorn tore through the bar to get as many pieces of the action as time would allow. Every gun in the place lit up, and as bullets ripped through fastgun and marshal alike, Lucian took cover behind a pool table—where he found himself in quite a different predicament.

“Hello, stranger,” said Senna, her gun squarely aimed at Lucian’s forehead. Her eyes were the color of a gentle prairie, mottled with specks of black, and Lucian almost forgot he was speaking into a loaded firearm.

“Ma’am,” he replied.

“I assume you choose to associate with these upstanding individuals?” she asked, as the lead-riddled body of a barkeep collapsed limply beside them. Black smoke drifted softly out of his mouth.

“Some of them,” Lucian answered.

Senna ducked as another shell ripped past the backside of the bar, taking a chunk of a pool table with it. The motion was so quick Lucian almost didn’t see it—then again, he’d never seen anyone dodge a bullet. Certainly not with such confidence, and Senna had plenty to spare.

She smiled warmly, her badge glinting in the light. The star of a chief marshal, one of the deadliest quickdraws in the known world.

“Well, to each their own,” she grinned, gingerly confiscating Lucian’s pistol. “Don’t worry, I’ll give it back… if you’re not dead when this is over.”

And with two quick shots from cover, she swung back into the fight, leaving Lucian wondering what had just happened.

The rest of the shootout was a blur. At one point the bounty hunter ripped some sort of oil-soaked object from the Outsider’s roiling body and ran out the saloon doors, and the creature went screaming after her. With most of the clientele dead and nobody left to shoot, the survivors went across the street to finish their drinks. Buzzard Gulch never found itself wanting for corpses or liquor.

It was there, the marshals like to say, that Lucian decided to hang up his hat and hunt monsters for the government.

Though they’ll also mention it was less about saving people from beasts, and more about a pretty girl who dodged a bullet with a smile.

The longhorn’s map had been useful, if sloppy. Lucian had followed it on foot for what seemed like a hundred years, further north from Angel's Perch than most living souls would ever dare to venture. Here colors seemed more vivid, the air itself breathed with strange magics, and when Lucian drifted off, he could swear gargantuan creatures lurked just beyond the edge of his vision, watching. Yet Lucian did not feel afraid. He made camp as the sun dipped over the horizon, and steeled himself. The shadow grew strongest at night.

He would sense its evil dragging him downwards, pulling him out of himself. Soon Lucian’s skin would itch and flake away, his mouth twisted into a hungry grin. He would feel the flames, hear the demon whisper in his own voice. He would drown in the crackling inferno of indigo sagelands erupting into a sea of hellfire. And he would feel the anger. The terrible, ageless anger, the shame, the disgust. Hateful bile born the from the darkness of his own soul. Only then would the battle begin—the demon assuming Lucian’s body, while what was left of the man tried to wrestle it back.

Lately, the transformations were beginning to last longer than Lucian liked.

He felt his skin begin to prickle, and watched as it cracked against the cool night air. Lucian rested himself against an old log, as comfortably as he could. His muscles froze in place—awaiting the change, and the struggle, and the promise of morning.

His eyes glazed over. The sky twisted into deep crimson—overtaken by a perpetual sundown, ringed with flame, and the trees around him stood as ghastly totems against thick, otherworldly fog. Only the campfire illuminated the world as it was, the greens and browns of patchy grassland. The change had begun.

Or if not the change, something worse.

Deep in the forest, a train whistle sounded. It rang hollow, a warped and yawning sound that spilled out from the demonic vision’s umber mist. This was something new, a creature Lucian had not prepared to face—and locked in combat with himself, he could not turn or draw. He tried to stand as thick metal legs splintered the primeval woodlands like they were toys, dragging a colossal torso awkwardly behind them. He could not move, nor turn his eyes from the glowing core of hungry coals, or grisly flesh, or smoke from bulbous locomotive valves that lined the shoulders of a long-dead giant.

A devil, Lucian thought. Another devil.

The hulking thing stepped before him, still obscured by fog, and bent its massive legs down until a familiar face leaned into view of the firelight.

“Lucian,” it spoke.

Lucian recognized it—him—instantly. The millionaire, long thought missing or dead, who so many years ago had wagered his own heart in an Outsider’s game of chance.

“Jeremiah?”

The old industrialist chuckled. He was hideously malformed—gone were even the last glimpses of his humanity, replaced instead by infernal steamwork and the gutted skeletons of a dozen ruined cargo trains. His belly swelled with heat of a devil’s furnace, and the campfire between the two travelers seemed to draw towards it, as though Jeremiah were breathing it in.

“I have shed that name, my good marshal,” he spoke, his voice melting over the land as Lucian sat paralyzed before him. “You may call me Urgot now, for that is the name I have taken.”

“I know what you are wondering,” he continued. “Understand that I was laid low in my efforts to civilize this desperate land, and divorced from my plans for a great steel empire. No, I made a mistake of hubris—I took a deal, as you once did… and paid so, so dearly for it.”

The colossus motioned towards where his heart might have been, now nothing but a tangled mass of white-hot copper. The rumors had been true. Jeremiah had died.

“It was not death,” he said, as if snatching the thought from the air. “Though by the time my treasured property was returned, it was far too late to call myself alive. My body was abandoned at the edge of the desert by some… associates… who have come to know the dire price of treachery. Yet as you are aware, there are many devils… and unlike the monster you failed to destroy, I was visited by one with a particularly tantalizing offer.”

Urgot was close now, the campfire pouring endlessly upwards into his stomach. The grinding of a thousand starving gears echoed from somewhere within him, and Lucian imagined a devouring maw, chaining the sky down before swallowing it whole.

“I know you will lose the duel within yourself, marshal. I did. Brought low by my losses I turned to common banditry, and the darkest hollows of my sadly mortal imagination. When you follow me down that trail—and you will—I intend to meet with the creature wearing your body. We have… a great many things to discuss.”

With that, the enormous metal legs pulled Urgot away, until even his illuminated hellmouth disappeared from view. The sky buckled, and broke—bitter sun replaced once more by cold, lightless midnight, and Lucian was alone.

The shadow would claim him soon.

He had to move quickly.

Lucian had been careless.

Forgetting what a devil was, the kind of power one could wield, he and Senna had rushed into an alpine tundra on horseback, determined to take Thresh with a single shot. Lucian was one of the greatest marshals the outfit had ever seen; Senna was the greatest. They were brave, and impetuous, and in love—and Thresh had been waiting for them.

The devil called Thresh was not an ordinary monster of the high frontier. Ravenous and cruel, he had lived for eons before the men of the Old World landed on his continent’s eastern shores.

The cosmic beings who birthed the gods grew old and died, their ancient bodies fell to earth to become the mountains and valleys and primordial seas, but Thresh continued on, his unnatural life sustained by a bottomless, ravenous thirst for destruction. Before spoken word could give shape to his name, all living things knew his face—the skull of a beast, hateful and burning, gazing balefully down upon them. His malice was woven so deeply into his ancient form that it could never be purged, and he walked across the broken bodies of the vast things he had outlived, devouring the souls of their sad and forgotten children.

Lucian didn’t even see his opponent before a razor whip sliced cleanly into his shoulder, knocking him from his mount and crippling his shooting arm. Senna leapt for her lover’s pistol, but she too was struck low by the devil’s power, walls of flame erupting from the earth as laughter echoed from his bleached, lidless skull. His voice rattled within their heads, a deep and primordial howl, and Lucian saw in his mind the beast sinking his blade deep into Senna’s throat. The fight had lasted only seconds, and already Thresh had won.

The devil stood over Senna, flames within his ancient body twisting against the chill air, and he drew a jagged blade from somewhere inside of his ragged, billowing coat. Lucian had seen the skinned corpses of a dozen frontier towns on the way to Thresh’s den, and the piles of twitching muscle where unlucky wagon trains had drawn his hellish gaze. Lucian was prepared for the devil to take him, and always had been—but he would not let Senna share the fate of a young and foolish gunfighter.

And perhaps, momentarily amused after so many years of dark, sumptuous slaughter, that was why Thresh offered him a deal.

Such a simple thing, Lucian had thought. So easy to accept.

His soul for the life of the girl.

Then the shadow took hold, the hate and shame within the young marshal coming alive, hijacking his senses, his body corrupting before Senna’s pleading eyes. The bargain had been struck, the pact sealed. As Lucian’s vision turned to flame, he watched the monstrous devil he had been sent to hunt turn to Senna’s defenseless body—laughing hideously as he ripped out her heart.

The holy reverend of New Eden was little known or understood, but the rumors of his supposed power had spread even as far as the eastern territories. A man who could speak with the dead, as many liked to say, though few did survive the pilgrimage into the unexplored northwest to see if the rumors were true. Those who struck out for New Eden never returned—and now, looking down upon the enclave from a nearby hill, Lucian understood why.

Untouched by the elements and unspoiled by the beasts of the forest, the modest church commune was small and thriving, surrounded by bountiful crops and quaint homes that seemed to swell with life. Children ran across dirt roads as shopkeeps and townspeople passed peacefully by, far removed from demons and Outsiders, gorgons and giants, and the machinations of bandit clans that should have long ago picked every building clean. It was a place from a storybook, bright and clean. Lucian wondered for a moment if he had lost the duel with the demon already, and this was his reward.

He descended from the hill, and the villagers turned to see the newcomer in their midst.

“You’ve come to meet the holy reverend?” asked a fresh-faced young man.

Lucian nodded.

“Then hallelujah, stranger,” he smiled. “You’ve come home.”

No town in Lucian’s memory accurately compared to the sights of New Eden. A bakery filled his nostrils with the scent of fresh bread, as young women danced and fiddlers played in the street. Songs of salvation drifted from mead halls that had never for a moment known the Old West’s violent madness. Ordinary people greeted him as he passed by, offering him food and water, asking where he came from and where he was going.

The demon raged inside him, but in the light of day Lucian could overpower it, control it. And there was something about this place that calmed him, in a way he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

“No one fears death here,” someone spoke. Lucian turned to find a kindly old man, dressed in a modest preacher’s frock, possessing a youthful glint in his now-faded eyes. “A fear of death is a fear of life. We accept death for what it is, and live a life free from the snares of its uncertainty.”

Lucian liked the way the man spoke. His speech lilted softly, like a song.

“I don’t know if I believe that,” replied Lucian.

The man smiled. “Of course.”

He continued on, walking in no particular direction. Lucian followed.

“We live in a land of angels and demons. We see their influence every day, for good or evil, and the calamities they wreak. The world is old, but many of our gods are still alive, watching over their progeny even now.”

He motioned to the center of town, where a picturesque church with white walls and a blue roof stood. The building was immaculate—even the stained glass windows seemed to glow, polished to a radiant sheen. Villagers milled in and out, talking and laughing, as children crowded around their legs. The building could have been erected yesterday.

“And they bestow the faithful with many gifts. The gift of life, the gift of love.”

The man turned to Lucian, a knowing smile upon his face.

“And the gift of death.”

Something rang curiously in Lucian’s ears. It was the way the man said death, the way the sound was shaped by his lips, much like a secret whispered to a lover. The passersby, too, had become still, their eyes closed as if dreaming, and they only opened them again when the odd melody had finished washing over them.

“Meet me inside, when you’re ready,” he said. “They call me Reverend Karthus, and I have so much I want to show you.”

The interior of the church was clean and white—its pews were polished, its pulpit modest. Karthus shooed the rest of his congregation outside, and they looked lovingly at Lucian as they passed. Some whispered a passing “welcome,” others clapped their hands together in quiet reverence. To Lucian, New Eden seemed to be a sleeping child that hadn’t yet awoken to the monsters in the world outside its door. The fact that it stood at all was testament to whatever powers Karthus claimed to possess, real or not.

Deep within Lucian, the shadow raged. He once again felt the itch beneath his skin, the flames bubbling up from some dark corner of his soul, and his mouth twisting into a forceful, mocking grin. But something was different—the creature was frightened, and Lucian couldn’t understand why.

“My, my,” Karthus spoke, a smile still crossing his face. “We can’t have that now, can we?”

The reverend picked up a small, black-bound book, emblazoned with the symbol of a golden key. With a gentle wave and some intangible words, the demon was suddenly silenced—but not before Lucian felt something else, something the creature had not done before. It whispered softly in his ear, the low and crackling whimper of a dying fire.

“They are monsters.”

“In a land of angels and demons, I wonder what you will become?” continued Karthus, resting a faded stole over his shoulders. The reverend then motioned for Lucian to kneel before him, and to Lucian’s surprise, he did.

“Why do you fight this battle? What do you have to gain?”

Lucian did not answer. The light had begun to fade, as New Eden’s hopeful music slowly twisted into a strange, lopsided dirge. Karthus nodded slowly, his smile widening, and Lucian kept his eyes locked ahead. A curious skittering echoed from the floorboards behind him. It was a sound he knew well.

“We give so much of ourselves to fear,” spoke Karthus, his voice growing deeper and darker. “And you have given most of all.”

Energies swirled about the old man—luminescent blues and greens in the rough shapes of friends Lucian had lost, things he had killed. They danced against the rafters of the now decrepit church, its paint peeling away to reveal black, moldering rot.

Lucian sensed the presence of at least a dozen shapes behind him. Some were crouched on all fours, others clambered softly over the warped and ruined pews, and still more waited outside the church, their human disguises melting away. Lucian now knew why the town lay untouched, why its people seemed so good and kind: they weren’t people at all. Or if they had been, they’d been dead a very long time.

Lucian’s hands moved slowly towards his pistols.

The reverend now loomed over him, lifting off the ground as he gripped the book with the golden key, his sermon exploding into a rapturous chorus of overlapping voices: “Our souls will be purified in the cool waters of death! Our broken spirits will be repaired, the things we lost shall be returned!”

The creatures behind Lucian crawled forward, slavering and starved, as Karthus floated ever upwards, his arms outstretched, ascending into the musty air. Images of Lucian’s past twirled all around him, men and women whose deaths played out again and again.

A familiar voice brushed against his ear, almost a word, but not.

“Do you hear her?” asked Karthus.

Lucian listened.

The sound was crackling sage, the ashes of a campfire, the striking of a match. It spoke of Senna’s death, and how Lucian had fallen into despair. For years the ruined marshal had wandered from place to place, dead in everything but name and emptied of all joy. As each day had passed, another small, cruel thing filled his mind, and the shadow had grown wild within him, his inner darkness yearning to seize control. Any offer of peace had to be investigated, no matter how dangerous or foolish.

Lucian had heard of a man who could speak with the dead, and gone without question. He had given himself to a shadow that took the shape of his own monstrous hatred, and allowed it to rule him utterly.

Lucian found himself alone with the demon—away from the church, and far from the streets of New Eden. The two stood apart, facing one another, in a moonlit field of white flowers. Lucian could feel the cool air against his skin. He could see the distant lights of a town, high in the mountains, and the moon hanging low in the sky. Beneath the demon the flowers burned, but the creature stood calmly, its face twisted into a familiar, ravenous grin.

Lucian breathed. So much of himself had been lost to the shadow—to Thresh, and the spectre of the unforgiving west. But he still ruled his own soul, half-corrupted as it was, and the shadow was a part of it—a part of him.

It drew closer, slowly, each step burning more flowers away.

Lucian reached out his hand, and the shadow rested a charred limb upon it. It whispered: “Would you cast your enemies into the fire?”

Lucian was silent. His skin crackled at the shadow’s touch, but he said nothing. It already had its answer.

It whispered once more, now in Lucian’s own voice, as its ashen body bonded with his mortal flesh: “Then we will go together.”

“Do you hear the love you have lost?” Karthus sang.

Lucian drew his pistol. “No.”

His arm elongated, stretching into the hellish cannon of the demon within him, and a ray of unholy flame ripped through Karthus’s forehead. As the preacher’s body fell, Lucian spun around, melting into shadow as a screaming ghoul leapt at him from one of the broken pews. He fired again, obliterating the creature, and launched a third shot into the crowd of its shriveled, wide-mouthed brethren—the fiddlers and bakers, dancers and farmers now shrunken, twisted, and hollow. The bullet exploded among them, blasting their bodies apart, and at once a swelling sea of horrors flowed in through the doors, windows, and broken cracks in the church’s ruined facade. New Eden had risen to greet him.

Lucian’s body gave way to the shadow, and it lifted its arms high as a stream of liquid fire tore through the crowd of monsters. The demon shrieked with joy, its voice melding with Lucian’s own, and it soared into the air as hellfire sprayed in every direction. Burning wood fell from the ceiling as shots tore outward through the church’s brittle walls and across the sprawling wastes of New Eden, setting the town alight. Ghouls shrieked in terror, their hordes turned to flee, but the demon was quick—springing through the crumbling roof and into the delipidated streets, firing the cannons of hell into the creatures’ still-open mouths.

Then, Lucian surged outwards from within the demon’s form, its body bursting into ashen mist. He clapped his pistols together as the undead hordes scattered in every direction. Artificial magics woven into the gunmetal bubbled, their intricate filigrees spiraling outward as the barrels hungrily fused. A concentrated beam of light surged from somewhere within them, cutting across the plains as screaming undead melted beneath its fury.

Soon the light faded, and the metal unwound itself as Lucian scanned his surroundings.

He waited. The shadow within him was quiet now. No more ghouls lept from the burning, derelict homes, or rose from the beds of rotten crops. Karthus lay dead as his church collapsed around him, flames consuming even the memory of his fell magic. Though from the corner of his eye Lucian swore he could see the old preacher, grinning among a crowd of New Eden’s townsfolk, as the burning roof finally caved in over their heads.

The former marshal turned back towards civilization and began to walk, the shadow grinning close behind.

He’d been close to speaking with Senna again. Closer than he’d ever been. But Lucian no longer needed the comforts of old rituals and incantation—he would see his love once more, one way or another, the day he was lowered into the dirt. That was the rightful end of a true and valiant gunfighter. Until then, there were terrible things lurking in the darkness, which could only imagine the demon soon to knock upon their doors.

Out there, somewhere in the wild expanses of the great frontier, Lucian had a devil to kill.

He wiped the gun’s stock a fourth time. He couldn’t be sure it was clean until he wiped it down four times. Didn’t matter that he hadn’t used it. Didn’t matter that he was only going to stow it in the bag under the bed. He couldn’t put it away until he was sure it was clean, and he couldn’t be sure it was clean until he had wiped it down four times. It was getting clean though. Four times makes it clean.

It was clean, and it was wonderful. His new patrons had been generous. But did the finest painters not deserve the finest brushes?

The scale and precision of the new device made his previous work with blades seem insignificant by comparison. Understanding firearm mechanics had taken him weeks of study, but evolving his ki techniques from blades had taken months.

The gun held four shots. Each bullet had been infused with magical energy. Each bullet was as perfect as a Lassilan monk’s blade. Each bullet was the paint from which his art would flow. Each bullet was a masterpiece. It didn’t just cut apart the body. It rearranged it.

The rehearsal at the mill town had already shown the gun’s potential. And his new employers had been pleased with the work’s reception.

He had finished polishing it, but with the gun in his right hand, the temptation was too great. He knew he shouldn’t, but he unpacked the black, eel-skin bodysuit. He drew the fingertips of his left hand across the slick surface of the clothes. The feel of the skin’s oily surface quickened his breath. He picked up the tight, leather mask, then—unable to help himself—slid it over his face. It covered his right eye and mouth. It constricted his breathing and removed his depth perception…

Delightful.

He was putting on the shoulder armor when the bells he’d hidden on the steps leading up to his room sounded. He quickly folded up the weapon and removed the mask.

“Hello?” the maid asked through the door. The lilt in her voice hinted to an upbringing far south of this town.

“You did what I asked?” he said.

“Yes, sir. A white lantern every four yards. A red lantern every sixteen.”

“Then I can begin,” Khada Jhin said as he swung open the door to his room.

The woman’s eyes widened as he exited his room. Jhin was well aware of how he looked. Normally, it elicited pangs of self-conscious loathing, but today was a performance day.

Today, Khada Jhin cut a slender, elegant figure as he walked out with a cane. He was hunched, and his cloak seemed to cover some huge deformity on his shoulder, but a jaunty stride belied this. He forcefully tapped the cane ahead of him as he marched toward the window. He tapped the frame rhythmically—three beats, then a fourth. His gold sparkled, his cream cloak flowed, and his jewels glittered in the sun.

“What… What is that?” the maid asked, indicating Jhin’s shoulder.

Jhin paused for a moment to study the woman’s cherubic face. It was round and perfectly symmetrical. A dull and predictable design. Removed, it would make a terrible mask.

“It’s for the crescendo, my darling,” Khada Jhin said.

From the inn’s window, he had a clear view of the rest of the town in the valley below him. This performance had to be wonderful, but there was still so much work to do. The councilman would be returning this evening—and so far, all of Jhin’s plans for tonight seemed… uninspired.

“I brought some flowers for your room,” the woman said, walking past him.

He could have used someone else to place the lanterns. But he didn’t. He could have changed clothes before opening his door. But he didn’t. Now she had seen Khada Jhin in his finery.

The inspiration he needed was so obvious now. So preordained. There was never a choice. There was no escaping the Art.

He would have to make this maid’s face... more interesting.

Shen considered the interior of the White Cliffs Inn. It was deceptively simple and rough. The wood weavers had been masters, removing the tree bark and living leaves only where necessary.

The candle on Shen’s table flickered… wrongly. He slid away from the table, retrieving his blades from under his cloak.

“Your students are as quiet as a pregnant worax,” he said.

Alone and dressed like a merchant, Zed entered the inn. Brushing past the waitress, he sat down three tables away. Every part of Shen wanted to dash at his foe, to avenge his father. But such was not the way of twilight. He calmed himself as he realized the distance was too far… even if only by the length of his index finger.

Shen looked over at Zed, expecting to see him grin. Instead, his rival sighed. His skin was sallow, and dark folds hung beneath his eyes.

“Years, I have waited,” said Shen.

“Have I misjudged the distance?” Zed asked wearily.

“Even if my head is cut off, I will still close and strike,” Shen continued, sliding his foot backward and cocking it against the floor. Zed was ten paces and one half of a finger length away.

“Your path’s closer to mine. Your father’s ideals were a weakness. Ionia could no longer afford them,” Zed said. He leaned back in his chair, keeping himself just outside of the range Shen would need to strike a killing blow. “I know that’s not something I can make you understand. But I will offer you a chance for vengeance.”

Shen inched forward to the edge of his chair. “I do not act because of vengeance. You defy the balance. For that, you are damned.”

“The Golden Demon escaped,” Zed said, simply.

“Impossible,” Shen replied, feeling a hollowness that caught in his chest.

“Your father’s greatest victory. And now, again, his foolish mercy has tarnished his legacy.” Zed shook his head. “You know what that… thing is capable of.” Then Zed leaned over the table, well within Shen’s range—his neck intentionally exposed. “And you know that we are the only two people who can get close enough to stop him.”

Shen remembered the first time he’d seen the body of someone killed by the infamous Khada Jhin. His skin prickled from the memory; his teeth clenched. Only his father had been strong enough to still believe a merciful justice could be served.

Something in Shen had changed that day. Something in Zed had broken.

Now, that monster had returned.

Shen put his swords on the table. He looked down at the perfect bowl of soup in front of him. Little droplets of the pork fat’s oil shimmered on its surface, but he wasn’t hungry anymore.

From the jetty, Jhin looked back to the foreign ship. The tide had come in, and the ship would be leaving in a few moments. He would have to return soon if he was going to perform in Zaun next month. Risk on top of risk.

He stopped to check his reflection in a puddle. From the water, a worried, elderly merchant stared back at him. Years of acting practice combined with his martial training had given him total control of his facial muscles. It was a common face, and he had given it an unexceptional expression. When he walked up the hill, Jhin blended easily into the crowd.

He checked the white lanterns above him, counting the distance. If Zed appeared, he would need them. At the inn on the top of the hill, he glanced at the planters where he had hidden traps. Sharpened steel blades, shaped like flowers. They protected his escape route in case anything went wrong.

He thought of how the metal would slice through the crowd and splash the building’s freshly painted teal walls with red. It was tempting.

He was pushing through the crowd when he heard the village elder speaking to Shen.

“Why would the demon attack her and the councilmen?” the elder asked.

Shen, dressed in his blue outfit, didn’t answer.

Another of the Kinkou, a young woman named Akali, stood beside Shen. She walked to the doorway of the inn.

“No,” Shen said as he blocked her path.

“What makes you think I’m not ready?” Akali demanded.

“Because I wasn’t when I was your age.”

At that moment, a town guard stumbled from the entrance, his face pale and hollow.

“Her flesh, it was… It was…” He took a few steps, then collapsed to the ground in shock.

Against the far wall, the tavern’s owner laughed. Then he began weeping—his face painted by madness. “He saw it. He saw the flower!”

These were not people who would forget seeing Khada Jhin’s work.

Shen scanned the faces of the onlookers.

Clever boy, Jhin thought, before fading into the back of the crowd.

He checked the rooftops for Zed as he walked back to the ship.

The work was inescapable. Together or apart, Zed and Shen would chase the clues he had left. They would follow them back to the Blossom Festival. Back to Jyom Pass. And when they became desperate, then they would have to work together again.

It would be like it had been when they were young. They would huddle together in awe and fear.

Only then would the great Khada Jhin reveal himself…

And his true masterpiece would begin.

One can travel to nearly any village across Ionia and hear the tale of the Capture of the Golden Demon. Depicted in a variety of plays and epic poems, the cruel spirit’s banishment is still celebrated to this day.

But at the heart of every myth there lies a kernel of truth, and the truth of the Golden Demon is one far different than the fiction.

For years, Ionia’s southern mountains were plagued by the infamous creature. Throughout the province of Zhyun, and even as far as Shon-Xan and Galrin, a monster slaughtered scores of travelers and sometimes whole farmsteads, leaving behind twisted displays of corpses. Armed militias searched the forests, towns hired demon hunters, Wuju masters patrolled the roads—but nothing slowed the beast’s grisly work.

In desperation, the Council of Zhyun sent an envoy to beg Great Master Kusho of the Kinkou Order for help. Charged with maintaining the balance between the spirit and material realms, Kusho was adept in the banishment of demons. Leaving in secret lest the cunning creature be alerted to their intent, Kusho, his teenage son, Shen, and young apprentice, Zed, traveled to the province. They tended to countless families shattered by the killings, dissected the horrific crime scenes, and looked for connections between the murders. Soon, Kusho realized they were far from the first to hunt this killer, and his conviction grew that this was the work of something beyond the demonic.

For the next four years, the Golden Demon remained beyond their reach, and the long investigation left the three men changed. The famous red mane of Kusho turned white; Shen, known for his wit and humor, became somber; and Zed, the brightest star of Kusho’s temple, began to struggle with his studies. It was almost as though the demon knew they were seeking it, and delighted in the torment sown by their failure.

Upon finally finding a pattern to the killings, the Great Master is quoted as saying: “Good and evil are not truths. They are born from men, and each sees the shades differently.” Kusho sought to hand off the investigation, believing now that they sought not a demon, but a wicked human or vastaya, taking them beyond the Kinkou’s mandate. Shen and Zed, unwilling to turn back after all they had sacrificed to bring the killer within reach, convinced him to continue the hunt.

On the eve of the Spirit Blossom Festival in Jyom Pass, Kusho disguised himself as a renowned calligrapher to blend in with the other guest artists. Then he waited. Shen and Zed laid a carefully prepared trap, and at long last, they found themselves face to face with their hated quarry. Kusho was proven right—the famed “Golden Demon” was a mere stagehand in Zhyun’s traveling theaters and opera houses, working under the name Khada Jhin.

After they caught Jhin, young Zed made to kill the cowering man, but Kusho held him back. He reminded his students that they had already broken their remit, and that killing Jhin would only worsen matters. Kusho worried that knowledge of Jhin’s humanity would undermine the harmony and trust that defined Ionian culture, or could even encourage others to commit similar crimes. Despite Jhin’s actions, the legendary master decided the killer should be taken alive and locked away within the monastery prison at Tuula.

Shen disagreed, but submitted to the emotionless logic of his father’s judgment. Zed, disturbed and haunted by the horrors he had witnessed, was unable to understand or accept this mercy, and it is said a resentment began to bloom in his heart.

Imprisoned in Tuula, Jhin kept his secrets, revealing little of himself as many years went by. The monks guarding him noted he was a bright student who excelled in many subjects, including smithing, poetry, and dance. Regardless, they could find nothing to cure him of his morbid fascinations. Meanwhile, outside the monastery’s walls, Ionia fell into turmoil as the Noxian empire invaded, and war awoke the tranquil nation’s appetite for bloodshed.

Jhin was freed from Tuula sometime after the war with Noxus, possibly put to use by one of the many radical elements vying for power of the First Lands near the conflict’s end. He now has access to the Kashuri armories’ new weapons, though how he came to possess such implements of destruction, and what connection he has to Kashuri, is still a mystery.

Whoever his shadowy patrons might be, they have endowed Jhin with nearly unlimited funds, and seem unconcerned by the growing scale of his “performances”. Recently, he attacked members of Zed’s Yanlei order, and mass murders and assassinations bearing his signature “flair” have occurred not only across Ionia’s many regions, but also in distant Piltover and Zaun.

It seems that all of Runeterra might be but a canvas for the atrocity that is Khada Jhin’s art, and only he knows where the next brushstroke will fall.