Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was perfectly adequate. The food, the wine, the lighting, the ambiance. Warm diffuse glow emanating from decorative paper lampshades. Softly scented candles. Aged wine and assorted cheeses on small platters next to delicate glass bowls containing fruit and intricate flower arrangements. Freshly cooked vibrantly colored vegetables next to his perfectly tender medium rare steak. Sett sighed. For most of his life, he could not have imagined himself enjoying such a meal, let alone being unimpressed by it. Knowing his fine tastes, his underlings had fussed and fretted in order to assure that his name day dinner would be the most exquisite this town could offer. For all intents and purposes they had succeeded - no one had screwed up, and the establishment itself was top notch. Yet the experience was just… adequate. When he first became powerful enough, he had made sure to enjoy more than his fair share of luxurious dinners, intricate fabrics, opulent décor, and anything else money could buy. Now, however, it was like his wine had been diluted with water, or like the steak was covered in a fine layer of ashes. Like the taste of life felt subdued - not unpalatable, but definitely duller. He didn’t want his underlings to think they had displeased him as this was no fault of theirs, so he picked up a crisp green grape from one of the little bowls. Without lifting his head from where it rested tilted against his palm, he popped the grape into his mouth and crushed it until it burst. Its sweetness tasted like puddle-water on his tongue.

Suddenly something broke through the cotton he had found his senses wrapped in. Live music complemented the patrons’ meals, sophisticated yet unobtrusive. But among the forgettable lines of the other instruments, something caught his attention. A violin - its sound was like a burst of wild hues in his mind. It seemed to radiate from a slender, darkly clad figure near the corner of the small stage area, turned away from everyone. Sett couldn’t see the man’s face, but his violin seemed to reach all his senses. His melody weaved and melded notes, sometimes with the delicate grace of curling vine tendrils, other times with the drama of a calligraphy brush. Utterly exquisite, it stood out so starkly against all other sensations that it nearly hurt.

It was like watching the only splash of color in the world blossom, then disappear. Sett barely noticed the evening fly by after that. His food tasted even more uninspiring now. The band hadn’t stopped playing, but by the time they finished dinner, the mysterious violinist had slipped away. Cursing himself for not having asked after him, Sett excused himself and went to splash some icy water on his face. It felt like nothing. As he started heading back to the table where his men were making to leave, he heard it again.

He froze. As he looked around, no one acted like anything was out of the ordinary. No one seemed to notice it, but the melody was definitely there, same as earlier. It seemed to be coming from behind him, deeper in the building. Looking outward, his underlings did not appear to have seen him lingering in the back, but they weren’t looking for him yet. Hesitating only for an instant, he turned back and followed the tug of the violin.

He was dimly aware of going through a series of empty back rooms, but he didn’t find himself in the kitchens. Peering behind a heavy red velvet curtain, Sett stepped into a long corridor with ornately patterned red wallpaper and dark wood wall panels and flooring. He knew that whenever he stopped, the melody grew quieter, but following it seemed to take him no closer to the source. Still, he followed.

Halfway along the corridor, Sett heard a quiet snap as his foot hit the floor. He tried turning his head down to search for the creaky floorboard, only to realize he was entirely immobilized.

“Show yourself!” he immediately commanded.

The response was a soft chuckle. Rather than coming from a particular direction, it seemed to diffuse around him from the cloud of dark billowy smoke that had suddenly enveloped him.

“Would you look at that,” the same voice mused. “You may enjoy beauty more like a glutton than a connoisseur, but you do seem to have some taste.”

“Who are you?” Sett spat back. A gloved hand reached up the back of his neck, clutched a fistful of his hair and forced his head back, another stabbing a small needle into the side of his neck. Sett could not move to react, or even to see what was being done to him.

“You’ll find out soon enough, boss,” the voice said flatly with a touch of amused mockery at the last word. The smoke surrounded him as the world grew hazy, and then completely black.

***

He came to as a hood was being pulled off of his head. His weight was partially suspended by the heavy chains around each of his wrists, holding his arms out wide. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he couldn’t make out anyone in the room with him, or at least within his field of view, but as he got up off his knees, the restraints seemed to adjust themselves, pulling his hands up and out, keeping his arms stretched out to his sides. He realized that his ankles were also secured, barely allowing him half a step in any direction. Besides that, he felt unscathed and intact, only minus his coat, shirt and shoes. An elaborate robbery? Surely not. Unlike his younger days, his head was now worth much more than his clothes.

He could see clearly now, but the room remained hazy with a dark gray fog-like smoke obscuring the features of the space. The wisps of smoke felt cool against his bare skin as they enveloped him again and he recalled his previous encounter.

“Who are you and what do you want?” Sett tried again, barely keeping his voice level.

No response. This person’s audacity was starting to irritate him.

“Y’know, things will go a lot better for you if you let me go of your own accord,” he continued dismissively. If they went through the trouble of capturing him, they must surely know of him, and if they weren’t completely witless, they must also know it wouldn’t end well if they continued trying to play warden with him.

Once again, they did not respond.

“Have it your way, then,” Sett muttered angrily. With his monstrous strength, it would be simple work to force his empty palms together, breaking the chains, just as he had broken the faces of his enemies into each other many times in his fighting days. And then… It had always surprised the crowd, the sheer force with which the unfortunate fools’ skulls would crash into one another, and the soupy mess they left behind. He prepared to release his power and braced himself for the shards…

…and nothing happened. He tried again and again, all with the same result - he could not summon up and release his power to break free. He wasn’t immobilized, which was all the more humiliating, being reduced to meager human strength.

The voice from the smoke laughed at him darkly and he remembered how he had blacked out. There must have been more in that syringe than just the tranquilizer. Some sort of silencing or disabling draught perhaps? Whatever it was, he was stuck here until it wore off.

“Now that I have your attention…” the disembodied voice whispered mockingly. The wisps of smoke swirled around Sett before hovering to the opposite corner of the room. They twisted and darkened, forming a strangely familiar humanlike figure. The figure looked masculine and slender, and its folded arms held something up near its face…

…A violin. Sett’s eyes widened slightly as the realization set in. So far, he had assumed that his capture had nothing to do with the events earlier that evening. His predicament seemed a touch more sinister now as he remembered how the violin had called to him, drawing him in. His captor had already shown himself capable enough to properly disable and restrain him - could it be that he had orchestrated everything much farther back? But the melody had truly touched him - was that just some sort of magic? Somehow he doubted that. He had so many questions.

None of which he got to ask before the violin started playing again. The figure of the violinist was non-corporeal as it seemed to be made of smoke, yet just like his voice, the sound was real. It started playing a slow, soft melody. It was subtly different from the previous one, but just as beautiful. It sounded like the two could build into each other as part of a larger piece.

Despite the situation, Sett found himself entranced by the melody once more. As the soft intricate notes grew more certain and pronounced, the stranger’s breathy voice whispered into his ear, “One…”. The whisper was much softer than his tone from earlier and felt like it was coming from very close, tingling the hairs at the back of his neck, warm air almost reaching him.

Just as the whisper reached his ears, an enchanted round fired from an unseen part of the room struck the center of Sett’s chest. The round was also incorporeal. That didn’t make it hurt any less. It felt like electrocuting riptides spread across his body from the point of impact in synchrony with the phrases of the melody, and his wildly pounding heart was the beat. He could almost appreciate the artistry of it. Much like earlier in the evening, when he had felt the melody touch more than one of his senses, there was a certain virtuosity in the harmony between the notes of the violin and the electric pain pulsing with the rhythm, gripping his body, forcing his muscles to convulse. He forced them to stillness, closed his eyes, and exhaled hard. He was alive. His body was undamaged. It was just a matter of time before the pain subsided.

The violin kept playing, and as it did, the currents kept dancing maddeningly all over his body. The intensity of the initial impact reverberated within him without diminishing, just as it did in his fights when he’d hold on to the pain from his enemies’ blows before unleashing it to retaliate against them.

All draughts and poisons he knew of would completely disable all forms of magic and other unnatural power, so when he had failed to use his power to break the chains, that is what he thought had happened to him. However, there was no mistaking it. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he was bathed in a golden glow radiating from his skin. His power hadn’t been stripped from him. He could feel it surging within him, but he could not grasp it to lash out at the phantom violinist.

“Gold becomes you,” the phantom voice intoned. “Surely nothing else feels quite like it.”

There was something smug and knowing hidden behind the words that sent an involuntary shiver through Sett’s spine. How much did this stranger know about him, exactly? It was impossible to remain in this state longer than an instant. If he ever got this way in a fight, the outcomes were win, (die), or, if he waited long enough, feel the intensity wash away from him.

“Oh, but I plan to keep you there,” the voice said, as if responding to his thoughts. “It’s simple to do, really, now that I am the one who controls when your power is released. All I have to do is keep hurting you and make sure you don’t die.”

As much as Sett hated to admit it, the stranger was right - he had no choice but to wait out the effect of the draught and suffer at the man’s whims in the meantime. He scoffed.

For a while, the smoky figure of the violinist allowed the melody to speak for itself. It was still as beautiful as it was painful. Then it was time for the next act.

“Two…” came as a more intense, almost sultry whisper as another shot hit him with chilling waves that mirrored the way the music was building, growing louder and more ominous. The impact knocked the air out of him and sent him reeling as the chains held him upright. Trying to breathe again cut through him like blades of ice. The rhythmic ripples were so cold it felt as if his flesh was cracking and shattering like ice crystals along fault lines that stretched out all over him in synchrony with the flowing notes. Two was much more severe than one had been. But now that he knew what it felt like, he could try to collect himself again. Regaining his footing and tensing every part of his body, Sett put all his attention into drawing measured breaths as he tried to quell the shaking.

The smoke swirled and clung to him closely and he felt like he was being watched. As if the smoke could feel through his skin and vicariously take in all his movements and sensations.

“It took me years to figure out the secret to your power,” the voice came as a nearly welcome distraction. The melody kept rippling and winding inexorably in the background, keeping him constantly swathed in gold. “I watched you in the pits night after night. It must have been hundreds of times. I have a taste for only the most exquisite of cruelty, but you truly were impressive to watch.”

“That’s a first,” Sett interjected. “Never been stalked by an onlooker before. Matter of fact, pit fighters don’t tend to have admirers. Just people who are sufficiently afraid of us that they convince themselves they respect us.”

“The crowds loved you, but I don’t think those simpletons understood why. They spoke of your stature and monstrous strength. But you have faced fighters bigger and more brutish than you. Faster. Likely stronger, too. And none that had the mob in such a frenzy as you did.”

“A bit too late to vie for my trust with flattery, don’t you think?” The other man ignored him.

“Of course, it was because no one else could pull off a reverse sweep quite so spectacularly. I just had to know how you did that so… reliably. Most seasoned fighters would dominate their opponents from the beginning. You were different. You’d regularly take more blows than most who lost their fights. They would have you down bloody with your face in the dirt. And then it would be over for them. I just had to know how you did it.”

“Same way I’ll snap you in half once this thing wears off,” Sett hissed.

Instead of a response, “Three!” came like a barked command out of the smoke around him. The shot seared him with unbearable fire as the melody swelled and quickened, matching the fever pitch of his heart. Sett cried out, his body certain that the air in his lungs had turned to molten metal while the licking flames melted his flesh as they spread over him. The feeling of flames, he reminded himself, gasping for breath.

“You know you are all bark right now, so behave,” the stranger’s voice dripped with equal parts derision and exhilaration at his pain as he continued his monologue. “Now, you had to have been hurt, sure. That much I figured out right away. But the timing had to be just right, too. I noticed you never seemed to retaliate with the same ferocity if you waited more than a few moments. I spent months wondering why you wouldn’t until it dawned on me that you probably just… couldn’t. That, and it appeared that the more severely you were hurt, the harder you hit back. Now that was what made your fights so intense to watch, and what made the crowds go berserk whenever you took someone out after they had seemed to nearly break you.”

The raging fire wasn’t relenting and Sett’s vision swam in and out of focus in his golden haze. It felt grueling just to listen to the violinist’s theatrical speaking mannerisms and eerie obsession with his past. His senses were on fire and his mind felt delirious. His head was pounding as droplets of sweat trickled down his face. Head down, his heavy form was now held up almost entirely by the chains.

“What do you… want with me, anyway?” he finally asked between unsteady breaths.

“It’s been so long since you’ve fought for your life. Now you have others doing the fighting for you,” the man remarked.

“I put my life on the line every step to make it out of that hellhole. Fought more than enough. More than anyone should have to,” his voice quivered with anger more than pain.

“You have,” the stranger replied without sarcasm. “And yet.”

The smoke around him reformed itself into the shape of the violinist. His body and face remained non-corporeal, but when that arm reached up, a real gloved hand grasped Sett’s hair, drawing him closer. When that voice whispered directly into his ear, he felt the caress of real breath: “You’re not as alive now as you were then. Nothing satisfies you. Not even you know what you need.”

The form dissipated and the black smoke spun around again. The music had never stopped, but when the figure reformed itself on the far side of the room again, he could see the violinist’s gestures that accompanied the elegant phrases and flourishes of the torturous melody.

“Most people I encounter only ever achieve true art for but a moment as I snuff them out. There is no beauty in their existence until I create meaning with their death. I seek beauty, yet it is ever fleeting and eludes me,” the stranger contemplated. “Your fights were some of the most breathtaking art I have ever seen. When you would stand knowingly on the brink of death, again and again, fully experiencing everything they would throw at you, holding out for the right moment to unleash it all back at them… That look in your eyes. The ferocity, the pain, the unbridled will to live. There truly isn’t anything like it.

“And now, being able to hold you suspended in that moment with the trigger at my command,” the stranger’s voice sounded ravenous all of a sudden, “...this is the greatest aesthetic rapture I have ever tasted in my life!”

“You’re a lunatic,” Sett rasped.

“I have one more shot for you, Sett,” he whispered, almost tenderly, “my finger is on the trigger.”

Sett’s mind screamed No!, but he wouldn’t allow the word to form on his lips. Each shot had been exponentially worse than the last. The unbearable reverberations of the pain trapped echoing inside him were already too much. Even knowing the shots weren’t physical, and as much as he hated himself for it, he felt a surge of genuine fear facing the thought of the next shot. But more than that…

This suffering, this fear, this desperation… they did remind him of fighting for his life, of teetering on the edge of oblivion and clawing his way back, of the desire to reject his fate, the hunger for life even at the cost of that of another. He remembered the sheer weight of the sensations in his body, both crushing and seemingly eternal, his anguished resolve as he reflected them outward in a desperate bid for survival. He was flooded with memories of those moments when he had experienced the most unparalleled intensity of existence.

“FOUR!” was an aching howl ringing in his ears. The shot had no other flavor besides white-hot and agonizing as the music reached its deafening culmination. It didn’t matter that Sett had expected it as its overwhelming intensity was on a different level than any of the previous shots. It transcended beyond pain or even pleasure. He heard his own scream as if it was coming from somewhere far away.

He shook violently as the savage tempest of sensations battered at him. Even an instant was too much to endure. If this feeling reverberated for even a second longer, his mind would be unraveled, Sett was certain of it.

The moment of the impact lingered and stretched into what felt like an eternity. Just then, forcibly released by his tormentor’s invisible trigger, all those sensations surged and rushed out of him with the momentousness of a torrential storm that racked his body as he strained against his bindings. At the edges of his tattered awareness he could hear that the stranger was screaming, too.

***

He peered in from the window to take one last drawn out look at Sett. With his powers and bindings cut loose, Sett was down on his hands and knees, sweating and shuddering with exhaustion as he tried to catch his breath. Even (or especially) in this state, he was striking.

He hadn’t been able to resist standing in the path of Sett’s vengeance as he had forced it out of him. It had felt every bit as ecstatic as he had imagined it to be, perhaps more. As he savored the sight of him, he used his smoke to leave him with one final whispered message:

“My name is Jhin. Seek me out if you'd like me to play for you again.”

Chapter Text

Sett awoke to the gentle caress of floorboards upon which he was splayed out facefirst. Had he passed out like that? He’d never been knocked out cold during a fight until now. Did that mean he had finally lost one?

Just as the panic started to creep in, another thought came to him. The surface underneath felt smooth and stuck to his cheek, very much unlike the packed dirt of the pit. Where then?

His groggy eyes struggled to cooperate with him, but even to his unfocused gaze the dark walnut color of the hardwood floor seemed really familiar. And those red and gold curtains in the distance…

The instant he realized that the quarters he was looking at were none other than his own, Sett jolted up in surprise. He found himself in a seated position before he was even aware of having moved, which later registered to him as possibly unwise. He braced himself for an imminent headache or dizziness from the sudden movement, but none came. So, he hadn’t passed out fighting, and he wasn’t hungover either.

Come to think of it, his body felt surprisingly relaxed, only a gentle soreness in his muscles. No sensation other than the slight pinprick sting on his skin as it had just been abruptly peeled off of the polished floorboards. That meant his chest was bare, but he noticed that he still had his pants on, and he couldn’t see any other people on the floor nearby, nor over on his bed and other furniture. So, no carnal adventures of the friendly kind either.

What shocked him the most was how profoundly blank his mind was. He couldn’t recall the last time he had slept such deep and utterly restful sleep so as to not even remember how or why he had fallen asleep on the floor, and his body wasn’t giving him any clues either.

Upon bringing his hands up to try to rub at his eyes, he finally spotted something unusual that made his hair stand on end. Red and purple markings encircled both his wrists in wide bands, raw around the edges where the skin must have broken.

Rubbing at his wrists, he shivered as his body remembered straining hard against chains, unable to break free. He noticed the same markings around his ankles as he pulled up the fabric a few inches above his bare feet. He hadn’t imagined it.

Sett had to find him.

***

Jhin awoke covered in sweat to the sight of thin golden veins of sunlight along the ceiling and walls over his bed. The heavy black velvet curtains blocking out the remaining light were the most extravagant feature of the otherwise sparse dark room. He accepted the fact that the clock was too far out of his view as his head rolled back, way too heavy to lift up. The angle of the streaks of light lining the ceiling suggested midday. The first deeper breath he took immediately brought his recollection of the previous night into sharp focus as the sensations caught up with him.

The poisons and enchantments had worked exactly as he had intended, giving him full control over Sett’s unnatural power. And, as he had suspected, the retaliatory strike Jhin had forced out of him had had more than just pure physical force behind it - even as Sett had been unable to move his body to physically deliver the attack, the immense force of it had landed on Jhin just the same.

He could have easily avoided it, could have stood farther away, could have used his smoke spell to dematerialize in that moment. However, he had come prepared with every healing scroll and potion known to him for exactly this reason - on some level he had known that he wouldn’t have been able to resist his desire to feel the impact. His incantations had undone the internal bleeding, had stitched the broken bones back together near-instantaneously. Even so, that strike had nearly killed him.

His euphoria in the aftermath of the performance had been sufficient to carry him back home despite his injuries, but now it felt as though his very bones were sore and battered. Trying in vain to move his neck as little as possible, Jhin looked down at his body out of the corners of his eyes. From hip to collarbone, his torso was covered in deep bluish-black bruises, or rather a single bruise spanning all that he could see of his skin. Each fiber of his being felt raw and stung each time he inhaled. Getting up today was out of the question.

With his mechanical arm, he reached into his nightstand for a healing salve, wincing as the prosthetic pulled on the chest muscles it was attached to. He bit down on his left fist, but hard as his teeth clenched around his real fingers, it still made for a poor distraction as he meticulously applied the searing ointment over his abused flesh.

The salve would help with the healing, but its effect was slow, so slow, and Jhin knew he was in for a long day and a longer night. He attempted to steady his breathing to try to reduce any movement in his body and save his strength and sanity, but instead he found himself trapped in a vicious cycle of blissful agony. It always started the same way.

Each time he drew breath, the intense pain forced him to remember the far greater severity of the initial blow, before his healing had taken effect.

And each time he was reminded that even that unmitigated, exquisite suffering would have been but a pale echo of what Sett would have felt before reflecting it on to him.

Jhin’s art always had him vicariously enjoying the pain he caused his victims, but never quite so directly as this.

Sett hadn’t wavered even once, hadn’t groveled or asked him to stop… but oh, how he had screamed for him at the end.

How he had looked at him.

Each time the mere memory of those eyes made Jhin’s heart pound in exhilaration.

And each time he was helpless against the shudders down his spine and the quickening breaths that hurt him anew, starting the cycle all over again.

The throbbing veins of sunlight shifted on the walls around him before they were slowly replaced by crawling moonbeams. Flat on his back, sweat-matted hair scattered across crimson bed sheets, Jhin lost track of time as he faded in and out of consciousness, haunted by Sett’s voice in both his fever dreams and his lucid moments.

***

The bellowing crowds sounded too distant as Sett took his seat directly above the fighting pit late that night. He had spent the day roaming the streets by himself to no avail. He hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone, but he was slowly coming to terms with the fact that his options were very limited as he couldn’t go off of appearance or scent. That white mask had fully obscured the stranger’s face, and that spell he had used to disperse his body into smoke also eliminated any traces of scent he might have caught. Naturally he also hadn’t left anything behind in Sett’s quarters either.

One of the combatants had just landed a heavy blow into the other’s side, and the latter was staggering precariously. The roar of the crowd cracked like a whip through the hot humid air.

Besides the alluring sound of his voice, all Sett really knew of his mysterious violinist was that he claimed to have repeatedly visited the pit where Sett used to fight, the same one he now ruled over. The same one he currently cast his gaze over, wondering whether he would even know it if one of the rows and rows of faces in the stands overhanging the arena belonged to the man he was hunting.

The faces contorted with bloodlust as the staggering fighter dropped to his knees and his enemy kicked him down onto his back. Sett didn’t think any of them fit.

The spectators hollered like rolling thunder when the man on the floor got his face kicked in. Sett was sure he would know the sound of that voice, even over the screaming of the crowds, if he heard it again right now, even if it were no more than a whisper. But even if he were here, why would he speak to Sett again, unless he wanted to be found?

Seek me out if you'd like me to play for you again.

***Ace of Masks***

The regal red canopy over Sett’s oversized bed appeared pitch black in the dark of the night that surrounded him. All he could see was an intricately carved ivory white mask outlined starkly against the vast blackness. It towered over him as he lay flat on his back, still, vulnerable.

A cold steel blade pressed into his throat as he heard that voice whisper, “Not even you know what you need.”

He reached a hand out towards the mask, but it dissipated into white smoke. The stranger laughed.

He awoke with a start, the sensation of the blade still cool against his skin.

***

Jhin pulled the trigger. His target was shoulder to shoulder with throngs of others in the vast crowded square. One shot was enough. The man painted the strangers around him with his blood. The color was vibrant, but alas, the shape and trajectory of the dramatic splash were quite derivative and did not excite Jhin. The man’s body slumped down and finally collapsed when the scared crowd scattered sufficiently to allow it enough space to fall onto the dusty cobblestone. The people were too frightened to try to figure out the source of the silent sniper shot from around all the grandiose buildings that overlooked the busy streets. A job well done.

Jhin had laid there motionless for hours in the dusty attic, taking only calculated breaths, almost forgetting his body as he fused with the rifle, staring through the scope. The recoil shook him through to his yet-unhealed wounds. He wouldn’t have minded, if not for the fact that it made his work a lot more inconvenient. Perhaps it was time to pay a visit to that underground apothecary again.

***

“So, you’re telling me no one saw anyone suspicious the other night at the restaurant, nor back at the estate?” Sett found himself increasingly exasperated with his henchmen.

Nine of his retainers had formed a neat row amid the indoor training grounds adjoining the arena, the same nine that had accompanied him to the name day dinner. They carefully followed Sett with their eyes as he paced up and down the line.

“No, boss,” a stocky man with a thick chestnut beard spoke up. “T’was just us and yourself, and the servants at the food place.”

“Someone suspicious from among the servants or the musicians? That strange man playing the violin?”

“Can’t say that I remember any of the performers,” the man tugged at his beard. The others also shook their heads, mystified. “I would imagine if there was anyone actin’ dangerous, we’d have known, though.” The rest nodded in unison.

“You imagine wrong,” Sett meant to keep his voice inscrutable, but this part came out sounding a lot closer to a growl as he looked the man dead in the eye. The silence was heavy as the poor underling seemed to be trying with all his might not to take a step back under his intense gaze.

Sett only broke off eye contact upon hearing someone else pipe up on the other side of the line, “Wait, what do you mean, boss?”

“Huh?!” he whirled and nearly pounced on the smaller man.

Framed by soft waves, his youthful, clean-shaven face appeared more confused than scared of Sett. “Do you mean to say that there was someone dangerous there?”

That the boy seemed to be sincere perplexed Sett even more. He hadn’t told them his side of the story and he didn’t intend to. He took a deep breath. Scaring his subordinates half to death would not be the best way to find out what he needed.

“Tell me everything you remember, starting with dinner.” An icy, but calm order.

“After the main course, we saw you going into the washrooms. We didn’t see you again that night, but… someone, one of us, though I’m blanking on who it was… err, he said you’d decided to retire for the night. Said that someone was escorting you back to the estate,” he could see a few other heads nodding reluctantly around him, as if they were just now remembering this. “Said he was supposed to join you as well after relaying your orders to us. Told us we were allowed to stay out and continue partying ourselves if we wanted. He ran off to join you, and the remaining nine of us went out to the pub.”

Nine. “Say that last part again.”

“... the remaining nine of us went out to the pub…”

“Can you count, kid?”

“Yeah, boss.”

“How many of us are here right now?”

“Nine - ten if we count you, boss.”

“Was there anyone who couldn’t come today as I ordered?”

Everyone seemed even more befuddled now, looking around at each other, shaking their heads. “No, boss,” Sett heard a few of them reply.

“Well then, if there were nine of you after he supposedly left to join me, how many did we have in total?”

“Eleven, if we count whoever was already escorting you… twelve with you, boss.”

“That man who relayed the orders to you… you thought he was one of you. What did he look like?”

Confusion all around. Heads scratching, brows furrowing, but no one stepped up to take the heat off the young man.

“Having a hard time recalling what he looked like. Apologies, boss, must’ve been all the ale we had playing tricks on my memory. Normal looking fella, I guess. Had dark hair, I think.”

“Did anyone see me leaving with whoever was supposedly escorting me?”

More shaking heads.

“What about back at the estate, did you see anyone there when you returned from the pub? Or anyone leaving later on?”

“Seemed peaceful and we didn’t wanna disturb you, boss,” the chestnut-bearded man chimed in again. “We went to our own quarters, all was quiet through the morning, don’t think anyone could have been there besides us.”

No one seemed to have anything to add. Sett sighed. “Alright, fine. You can go back to work now.” Baffled but relieved, his men started filing out.

Not one, but two unaccounted for. Well, that was if the impostor’s words were to be believed. Just as likely the stranger could have pretended to be one of his retainers and just lied after he’d knocked Sett out. The men must have seen the violinist’s real face, but found themselves unable to remember it… Sett was furious at failing to find out more while he was this close. Some sort of magic must have been afoot; simple liquor could not have been enough to make nine men forget a face at the same time. And he knew for a fact that his scream could have woken the dead, yet somehow no one seemed to have heard. He shuddered. At least he was glad about that part.

Chapter Text

***Two of Cups***

Sett found himself sitting in an ill-lit room across from a hooded man whose face was covered in shadow. A dusty crimson velvet tablecloth covered the small round table between them.

On it were two rough-hewn wooden cups of pitch black liquid. The stranger pushed one of the cups towards Sett and reached for the other one.

They each downed the liquid in their cups.

Then, all of a sudden the stranger lunged forward and reached his hand right through Sett’s ribcage, wrapping his cold, bony fingers painfully around his heart.

Sett screamed, startling himself awake with the loud, echoing sound. He hoped it only echoed in his dreamscape.

***

Jhin deftly navigated the maze of winding unpaved market streets. He wore his real face and some drab clothing to blend in seamlessly with the crowd. He turned a corner into a deserted narrow side street. Glancing around to make sure no one was there and all the wooden shutters were firmly closed, he entered one of the buildings.

The front was a woodblock printing shop. Stacks and stacks of rolled up scrolls were precariously piled ceiling-high onto wooden shelves lining the walls. The attendant, a plainly dressed old woman with tightly braided gray hair reaching down to her ankles, stood hunched over the equipment on the massive work table. She seemed to be working on the repeating and overlapping patterns for a sprawling maze of intertwining golden lines printed on a thick, heavy scroll so large that it cascaded off the sides of the table, edges rolled up on the floor.

“It’s not finished,” she murmured without looking at him. “Come back tomorrow.”

“I’m here to see him.”

“Oh,” she looked up at last. “Forgive my grumpiness, this is taking forever. You can go right on in.”

Jhin proceeded to one of the few narrow strips of wall not covered in shelves. This one was lined with beautiful black and vermillion geometric wallpaper with an intricate hexagonal asanoha pattern. Jhin pressed his back to the wall, fingers moving to the familiar trap lever concealed in the pattern. The wall panel spun soundlessly around its well-oiled vertical central axis until it flipped him into the hidden room behind the wall. Anyone looking into the print shop would now see the inconspicuous reverse side of the wall panel, also covered in the same wallpaper pattern. The space behind the wall had a narrow staircase leading downward.

The underground room was a lot larger and taller than the print shop above. It had no windows, lit by clusters of candles scattered about the corners and side tables, as well as by the purple and acid green luminescence emanating from a series of tubes of thick, bubbling fluid arranged along the back wall. The remaining walls were lined with tall cabinets of miscellaneous jars, flasks and bottles, as well as countless small drawers of reagents.

The only sound in the entire room came from the rolling of a giant grinding wheel operated by an even more giant man with a broad face and rugged features. The man’s stature meant he towered over Jhin like an adult over a child, and his forearms were nearly the size of Jhin’s thighs.

“Look who walked in here alive,” he greeted in a booming voice, chuckling as he set the grinding wheel aside. “Does that mean it worked, then?”

“It did. That was some fine work, apothecary - I hadn’t met anyone who could make a draught that suppresses one’s control of their powers without silencing their arcana entirely.”

“Aye, it’s more advanced than you even know! Those paired draughts have to be perfectly attuned to each other to allow for one to control the power of another without also impairing the mind or creating some uglier consequences. Speaking of, did you experience any side effects of the paired half you took?”

“I don’t… think so?” Jhin mused. “These side effects you mention. Do you know if the other half might cause any that I don’t share? Could it affect the workings of the memory poison?”

“No way to tell for sure about the side effects without asking him yourself, but I think it’s unlikely that they’d be different than yours because of the pairing. As for the memory poison, that effect is fairly robust. In humans, at least. Yordles and vastaya tend to be more resistant to that stuff in the first place, though, so perhaps other interference might make it wear off in them.”

“What about hybrids?”

“Who knows?” The apothecary looked at Jhin pensively and he wondered if he’d revealed too much. “Suppose the same person who administered the memory poison to this… hybrid, also used the pairing draught on him… Perhaps visions, dreams, emotions coming from the buried memories. But could the effect be undone, could the lost memories resurface, in whole or in part… that I do not know.” Snapping back to the present, he quickly added, “now then, I don’t suppose you came here just to chat about alchemy. What do you need?”

“Some interrogation serums, salves, inks, the usual. And, uhm… I need some help with this,” said Jhin, pulling open one side of his wrap shirt to reveal the still-dark bruising on his chest. “Gets in the way of my work.”

“Hell, I thought you said it went well!” the apothecary seemed perturbed.

“I did, and it did,” Jhin assured. “This is something else.”

“That sure must have been one tough customer, Jhin,” the apothecary shook his head. “You really need to stop running into trouble and then crawling back over here for healing. Gonna get yourself killed.”

He had already started rummaging in the drawers as he was scolding Jhin.

***

“Masked spy, talks like an art snob. Plays the violin. Know of anyone like him?” Sett rested his elbows on the assorted orange, mauve and ochre cushions piled on his side of the palanquin and leaned back casually. He had reached out to one of the informants he usually paid to tip him off about any changes that could affect his underground trading routes.

To the untrained eye, the flowing deep brown curls, elegant mannerisms and delicately embroidered ink-blue silks of the man sitting across from Sett would not seem to belong to one who deals in secrets, a fact that worked to his advantage. His devious dark eyes gave Sett a probing look in the amber light filtering through the walls of the palanquin, and Sett wondered if forcing his voice and posture to appear relaxed was enough to conceal just how badly he needed the answer.

“Doesn’t ring a bell, unfortunately,” the informant smiled a cunning smile, as if scanning Sett for signs of unease. “Though I wonder who it might be that has the likes of you so on edge. Can you not remember anything else about him?”

“I think he said his name was Jhin, but that could be fake.”

“Jhin?” It was now the informant’s turn to betray a touch of intrigue in his tone. “As in, Khada Jhin, the Golden Demon?”

“I don’t know,” Sett was getting restless now, leaning forward on instinct. “Possibly - what can you tell me about this Golden Demon?”

“Well, for starters, he’s not a spy, at least not most of the time. He’s an assassin who kills for both work and play. His work is quite gruesome.”

“Thought he seemed sophisticated, not brutal. Doesn’t feel right, I fear…”

“Indeed, it is odd that both of you walked away from your meeting alive. But then again, he is known to be fond of the arts, in his own twisted way. Used to work in a theater. They say he even sees killing as art, which is why the bodies he leaves behind can sometimes be such grisly spectacles.”

“Urghh. Are you certain that there isn’t someone else of that name?”

“Not that I know of… and that’s saying something,” Sett’s companion gave him a sympathetic half-smile. “Oh, I almost forgot - I’ve heard that the Golden Demon is oddly fond of the number four.”

***Three of Staves***

Sett saw Jhin in his dreams again. This time he knew he was dreaming, but he still couldn’t break away.

Jhin was playing that beautiful melody on the violin again, surrounded by flames gradually consuming everything around him. Sett was not there with him and couldn’t speak. Instead, he felt as if he was the violin itself, tendons and muscles pulled taut. When Jhin’s fingers and bow pressed the strings, he felt as if his own body tensed and stretched beyond its limits. When Jhin hit the vibrato on his dramatic high notes, it ached.

The flames kept creeping closer, burning the edges of Jhin’s clothes. His hair. The bow. The violin caught fire, too, and Sett felt it, but he remained trapped in the dream, unable to make a sound.

The corners of Jhin’s white mask were now ablaze. The flames kept devouring them both until fire erupted from the very eyehole of the mask, and the scene was no more.

***

Jhin worried about the memory poison after hearing the apothecary’s words.

He’d found himself free that night and was taking a stroll through a more secluded section of the city’s sprawling gardens. The gardens had a stunning design that fused traditional Ionian motifs with some stylized Demacian inspiration. Jhin had chosen a rock garden sequestered by maze hedges. Instead of larger, darker boulders, the emphasis pieces were nude white marble statues arranged in a battle scene. Instead of being grouped on a large elevated pedestal, the statues were embedded into the rock garden directly, pristine white pebbles aligned in concentric circles simulating ripples around each one.

Jhin worried because if the effects should fail, it would mean that he would have failed to uphold his part of the agreement.

He’d been resting with his back leaned against one of the statues, an archer holding a fully drawn warbow. Like the others, this statue’s pose was exaggerated to highlight the might of the fighter’s physique.

He’d been so careful with Sett. So careful not to touch his skin directly. Not to see him bleed. All because he wasn’t sure he could trust himself in the face of his instinct. After all, it had been so long since he’d touched the body of another human being without thoroughly dismantling them.

He turned into the archer’s chest. Its terrain was laid out so clearly, an apprentice artist could use it to learn about anatomy. Removing his glove, he traced it. Shoulder. Collarbone. Sternum. Abdomen. Navel. They were cold, unlike skin, and it didn’t hurt Jhin to touch them. Unlike skin.

He’d been so careful, but it could all be for naught.

Why had he told Sett his name?

***

Jhin. That was indeed the stranger’s name, or at least a name he went by.

Despite what he had learned, Sett’s search had stalled once more, and he’d resorted to wandering the streets again - more out of the desire to have time alone to think than any real hope of finding anything.

Jhin being an assassin, that didn’t make any sense. If he had been hired to go after Sett, why hadn’t he finished the job? He could have. He also hadn’t asked him about any intel, nor taken anything.

That Jhin might just enjoy violence, that Sett could believe. He had seemed to savor the whole thing. But even then, why let him go? And why put himself in danger by giving away his name?

Pacing frantically, Sett couldn’t begin to wrap his head around it.

He kept going through all the pieces of information he’d gathered over and over again.

One, Jhin had indeed been there with him that night. The markings on Sett’s wrists showed as much.

Two, no one else saw him there, or no one who saw remembered anything. Sett trusted his men enough to believe that.

Three, despite the pain, Sett had been allowed to walk away unscathed at Jhin’s design. For whatever reason, Jhin had decided not to kill him.

Four.

This one he wasn’t certain of, not rationally.

But the whole situation had felt personal somehow.

The way Jhin had appeared to understand the ins and outs of Sett’s power and his past.

Whatever sorcery he had put in place to make sure their encounter was discreet and no one else heard or remembered anything.

How Jhin had seemed to revel in Sett’s suffering, only to let him go unharmed afterwards.

But if that were true, and if Jhin risked revealing his identity for it, why had he not been more forward with his intent?

People usually had no problem being forward with Sett. Sure, he could chalk it up to them seeing him as less than human and thus not worthy of subtlety. But still, they never seemed reluctant to give him looks that did not belong in public in broad daylight. They would walk up to him and try to touch him. Or they would joke about fighting him and being overpowered by him, and how much fun that would be. Sometimes he even indulged them.

He found his thoughts suddenly interrupted by the awe-inspiring sight of a giant scroll of intricate printwork hanging at the front of one of the historic buildings from three stories above. The scroll seemed to be advertising a play called “The King in Gold and the Pallid Mask” coming up about two months ahead at one of the city’s nearby theaters. The top part of the composition was split vertically down the middle into two contrasting halves of a face. The left half had strong, visible features, deep carmine hair, and a golden crown. The right half wore a familiar ivory mask.

Sett felt his blood pumping feverishly.

The skies were also split, with the left half cast against fiery sunset colors and the right against a silvery moonlit landscape. Beneath them was a city skyline, followed below by a sprawling maze of golden lines that could possibly be threads, veins or roots. A quote was also included at the bottom: “The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord.”

Sett ached with hunger to hunt. Surely he must be losing his mind. Imagining that a deranged killer wanted more with him, and now seeing his face everywhere. As he headed back home, he could feel reason slipping away from him as his instinct screamed that the scroll hid a secret that could take him to Jhin somehow.

***Four of Swords***

Clear blue sky framed by arcing sandstone. Sett was looking up from inside an arena larger than any pit he’d ever fought in. The arena was so grand that the faces of the spectators appeared tiny in the distance, yet there were so many of them that their shouts deafened him.

His opponent was a raven-haired Noxian with huge steel pauldrons and a red cloak. Sett didn’t know him. The severe features of his face appeared disciplined by expertise and calm thought, though his eyes burned with pure bloodlust. He lunged, but Sett found himself paralyzed, and with a few swift movements the Noxian fighter knocked him onto his back.

Sett remained unable to move as his opponent stomped a plated boot on his chest and looked to a shadow-faced arbiter, as if awaiting the order.

Instead of counting back from ten, the arbiter started at “One.” He had Jhin’s voice.

“Two,” and the Noxian turned to face Sett again.

“Three,” he readied his axe and rested the edge against Sett’s throat.

“Four!” heralded the end. At the arbiter’s gesture the Noxian brought the axe down in a forceful but measured swing.

Though his head had been cleanly severed, Sett could somehow still see the arena for a while longer. The sand floor overflowed with blood, flooding the arena, pooling at the edges, rising higher to overtake the stands, drowning the crowd, which was now entirely made up of white masks with hungry red eyes.

***

The still-warm blood flowed out in long clean lines onto the white marble floor, just as Jhin had intended. The centerpiece of his artwork now lay dead on his back in the center of the room, dark curly locks and spread-eagle limbs making up the pistil of his bloody flower. Jhin had interrogated him during the vivisection, and the man had spilled the answers to all his client’s questions all too quickly as Jhin was painstakingly peeling away and arranging countless thin elongated slivers of his skin and muscle fibers, allowing them to just barely remain attached to the limbs like the delicate petals on a chrysanthemum.

The dramatic linework and red-on-white contrast worked flawlessly, yet Jhin found himself somewhat bored and even a little disappointed at how readily the man had given away the necessary information. He’d told Jhin all he needed to know when they had only just begun, and he’d stopped screaming not long after that.

Jhin couldn’t help but wonder how different the artwork would have been if Sett was the centerpiece instead. What it might have felt like to paint with his blood. How much harder he would have tried to hold back the information he had. How much longer he would have lasted before dying by his hand.

Jhin’s blood ran cold at that thought. While it delighted him to imagine that Sett might be strong enough to keep the truth from him until he died, the thought of reducing him to lifeless eyes and cold dead blood filled Jhin with an unfamiliar and different emotion altogether.

Was that…

… fear?

***

This time Sett awoke from his unsettling dreams with a revelation.

That Noxian fighter he saw in his dream had looked at him with pure murderous intent. It had filled Sett with utter dread and helpless horror as the nightmare held him down motionless with paralysis.

That’s what was missing from his dreams about Jhin - fear!

Yes, by the end of their last meeting he had felt scared of how much it had hurt, but it wasn’t the same abject terror as when he was knowingly awaiting death at the hand of his bloodthirsty opponent.

His instincts often subconsciously told him things about others’ emotions and intentions, and they were rarely wrong. For some reason he’d never gotten the feeling that Jhin truly wanted him dead, and so far he hadn’t been wrong about that either.

He headed out by himself in the direction of the towering scroll, determined to unravel its mystery. If he had no further clues to go by, he might as well follow his instinct. Though it felt like madness, he hadn’t been led astray yet.

He stared closely at the intertwining golden lines in the bottom half of the artwork. Were they tendrils? …veins? …streets? They seemed way too cluttered to be an actual map. What was he still missing?

I’ve heard that the Golden Demon is oddly fond of the number four.

That had to be the answer. It had been the answer when they had met and it was the answer in his dreams, confirmed by intel from his informant.

Sett studied the edges of the scroll. He noticed that while the middle was a jumbled mess, all the lines started out parallel and orderly when they originated at the edges. He traced the fourth line down and followed its winding path with his eyes. When it reached the midpoint of the scroll, it intersected such that several other lines emanated from it in a downward direction, but none crossed it and went upward.

Much like the junctures around the building he was standing next to! It was an impressive old edifice emblematic of the city, and it was very wide, spanning several hundred meters, terminating multiple oncoming perpendicular intersections with its uninterrupted walls and columned entrances. That had to be it, because it made sense that the building where the scroll was displayed would fall right in the middle of the lower part of the composition.

From there, Sett figured out that if he only looked at every fourth line counting from the edges, the lines wove into each other much more neatly, forming a crude map of the surrounding area.

And feeding through the skyline into the half-masked face above.

He now knew where to find him, and he was going alone.

Chapter Text

Two clicks echoed throughout the stage of the dusty abandoned theater. In the utter silence even these soft noises felt impossibly loud.

The first click, Sett’s foot stepping on a hidden trap. His visit was unexpected.

The second - the cocking of Jhin’s gun at the back of Sett’s neck - followed immediately, as if on cue. Jhin could ask the questions after assuring his safety.

Without missing a beat with his leg immobilized, Sett wove his right hand backward into Jhin’s gun-wielding arm as he ducked. Jhin could understand why his fighting prowess was unrivaled.

“I ain’t falling for that trap twice,” Sett smirked as he wrestled Jhin’s gun away and kicked it across the floor, out of reach. He had found his hideout, and now at this distance, his formidable strength could easily overpower the smaller Jhin in the absence of the gun - but Sett didn’t make a move right away. He kicked off the trap and just stood there, equally stunning and terrifying.

“Why are you here?” Jhin asked.

“Your last performance was impressive, but you left before I could get your autograph,” Sett flashed a hungry grin as he pounced forward. His sheer mass sent them both tumbling, and Jhin landed painfully on his back.

Sett pinned him to the floor, straddled him and laid a gloved hand around his throat. He didn’t squeeze. “So, you have a body after all.”

Jhin was suddenly very aware of his body as Sett held him down, unknowingly aggravating his unhealed injuries. Sett pointedly did not tighten his grasp on Jhin’s neck as he stared him down in the dim light with a curious look on his face. He was no longer smiling and his amber eyes were arresting, entrapping Jhin like an unsuspecting insect.

In oppressive silence, Sett reached his other hand towards Jhin’s mask. Jhin had no choice but to transform into his black smoke, quickly reforming himself next to Sett’s right arm. The instant Jhin dematerialised from beneath him had Sett off balance just slightly, but enough for Jhin to use Sett’s own forward momentum to land him face down on the floor. Jhin managed to twist Sett’s arm backward and inward, placing his right shoulder in a joint lock as he held the elbow and wrist in calculated alignment.

Jhin preferred to fight from a distance, but he had a few tricks up his sleeve should anyone come up close. He had always appreciated the precision of a move like this because it lined up the victim’s joints in such positions and at such angles that made it impossible for them to get free. He especially enjoyed using it on stronger opponents as once he landed it, strength no longer mattered; all the victim could accomplish with their strength might be to break their own bones if they struggled hard enough. To Jhin’s delight, Sett struggled against his grip. Jhin heard the joints grinding together as a still-trapped Sett hissed in pain.

Jhin wanted to ask Sett once more what he was doing here, but what slipped out instead was, “Why didn’t you kill me?”

“That’s my line.”

Startled, Jhin let go of his hold on Sett’s arm and leapt several paces backward into the shadows. “You mean to say that you don’t know and you still didn’t go for my throat?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sett got up slowly.

“I was… exceptionally cruel to you.” The thrill of the memory had the hairs at the back of Jhin’s neck tingling. He hoped Sett’s response to the provocation might clue him in to what was happening.

“Lotta people have it out for me, I don’t take it personally.” Sett didn’t seem to take the bait. “Just need to know who’s behind it.”

Jhin lurked silently in the shadows. Sett didn’t move, but faced him squarely, his posture relaxed and self assured.

“Are you telling me you’re so afraid of me now that you won’t talk to me anymore?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Jhin muttered from the darkness.

“You were awfully talkative last time,” Sett continued unhurriedly. He shrugged the sleeveless fur coat off his bare shoulders and let it slide down his back until it fell behind him with a dull thud. “What changed?”

The stage’s only illumination consisted of a few low sunset beams that breached the dilapidated roof and streaked through the dust-filled air. That warm light was soft yet dramatic as it hit the sculpted contours of Sett’s imposing body.

“I thought you were someone who punches first and asks questions later.” Jhin stood transfixed. “What makes you so sure it’s safe not to do that right now?”

“Because I had people look into your work, Golden Demon. You kill people for money, mutilate them for fun and call it art. I don’t judge, not like my line of work is pretty.” Sett dropped his knuckle dusters, rings and wrist cuffs on the floor as well and took a small step in Jhin’s direction. Why did the air feel so viscous and heavy?

“But I know what my head is worth to my enemies.” Sett paused and worked intently on the leather straps of his left glove while Jhin stood frozen in place. Sett carefully pulled the glove off one finger at a time before dropping it on the floor.

“And I know you get a kick out of seeing me wrecked because you said so yourself.” Sett’s voice was level but gained a dangerous edge. His inscrutable gaze stayed fixed on his remaining fingerless glove as he deliberately undid the buckles. Before long, the right glove joined the left on the floor.

“So why? Why didn’t you kill me?” Sett casually slid a finger down his gold necklace while Jhin watched breathlessly.

“Why did you take pains not to spill a single drop of my blood?” Sett’s hand traced his collarbone and he seemingly decided to keep the necklace on. He took another step toward a dumbstruck Jhin.

He lifted his eyes for a moment. They burned Jhin, but he remained silent.

After a short but tense pause, Sett closed the remaining distance between them as he painstakingly unwound the bandages around his fingers and wrists one at a time and dropped them down, too.

He now stood right on the edge of the light, with Jhin on the other side of the line. The silence seemed to stretch on forever, and Jhin felt weak. They were close enough that either could reach out and touch the other.

“If you won’t tell me, then let’s do things your way.” Sett’s voice remained light even as his eyes felt as though they were singeing Jhin’s very flesh.

“Here.” Sett brought his wrists together and raised them slightly towards Jhin in a pointed gesture. “So you know I won’t be able to hurt you,” he added with a daring smirk, as if mocking him.

“What if I refuse?” Jhin kept his voice aloof, but he felt elation and alarm clashing within him. If Sett hadn’t regained his lost memories, what had gotten into him?

“You won’t," Sett leaned in close with a whisper, and he was right. His voice was both rough and soft with just the right amount of arrogance in it. Jhin’s breath caught painfully in his chest and he found himself in awe of how Sett was able to convincingly posture strength while gambling on making himself so vulnerable again. Jhin’s frenzied anticipation overtook any remaining disquiet.

“All that, just to talk to me?” Jhin pondered. “You’re the lunatic here.”

“So, what’ll it be?”

“Follow me.” Jhin led the way into the pitch dark of the backstage area before heading down a set of hidden stairs to the underground level where lit sconces lined the main stone corridor. No one had used the theater for years and the above-ground levels had started falling into disrepair, but the underground levels were still sturdy and held several rooms that Jhin sometimes used for rest, storage, containment, or longer private performances.

He took Sett into one of his favorite rooms. While the corridor resembled a dungeon with its walls and floor carved of rough-hewn stone, this room was more refined. The walls held a multitude of carved niches with clusters of pale candles that Jhin lit. Benches and tables had also been carved into the stone, with a few fur rugs scattered here and there. Jhin liked the room especially because it had a ceiling rig at its center with a matching one on the floor beneath it where subjects could be suspended for him to observe from all sides. Various tools lined the back wall, including knives, leather straps, ropes, chains, and an assortment of whipping implements.

“I would expect no less from someone of your appetites.” Sett smirked.

Jhin perused his collection for the right choice of ropes.

“Those won’t do, you’ll need something heavier,” Sett remarked nonchalantly, peering from behind his shoulder.

Right again. Jhin moved towards the section that had the shackles and chains. Sett was already wearing gold and the color suited him utterly, so Jhin settled on a robust set of ritual irons plated with alloyed gold.

Satisfied, Jhin attached the chains to the rigs before snapping the other end closed around Sett’s willing wrists. He also secured his ankles and used the cranks to pull his hands together above his head until he was fully on display, but not suspended.

The flickering dance of shadow and candlelight caressed Sett’s exposed skin. Like a hungry vulture, Jhin sauntered in a slow circle around him.

“See, I knew you wouldn’t turn down our little chat.”

“How do I know you’re not trying to trick me into lowering my guard so you can use your power?”

“Guess you’ll have to find that out for yourself, unless you have more of that poison.”

“But I wonder, what will it take for you to use it of your own will?” Jhin taunted.

“Then make me,” Sett’s voice was suddenly icy and daring. He was still relaxed but looked at Jhin with unambiguous challenge in his eyes. What a treat.

“Should you really be provoking me in your present position?”

“Provoking you? I’m just giving you what you want so you’ll answer my questions.”

“What I want?”

“Unless after all your talk of… aesthetic rapture… you don’t want to hurt me anymore?” Ridicule and temptation both radiated from Sett’s words. “Now hit me!”

Surprised at how quickly Sett’s taunts got under his skin, Jhin responded with a hard punch to Sett’s stomach.

Sett coughed and inhaled sharply to recover the air in his lungs, but seemed unfazed otherwise. “Good choice. Now, what sort of high were you chasing in… performing for me?”

“Do you really want to know that badly?” Jhin savored the words on his tongue, barely concealing his bloodlust. With his memories or without, Sett had walked in here willingly, after all.

Jhin doubted that the mask did much to hide the devious glimmer in his eyes as he removed Sett’s belt, folded the leather in two, and struck him across the chest. Then again, and again. The stinging blows did not result in much other than slightly sharper breaths and an occasional wince from Sett, but Jhin enjoyed the process and this was merely the beginning. Besides, Jhin revelled in the fact that even with a stoic subject, the body didn’t lie and the muscles couldn't help but tense and flex when struck, making for an exquisite display.

From one of the wall shelves where he kept his apothecary supplies, Jhin picked up a clear crystal vial of liquid golden-colored fire ink and an inkbrush large enough to produce brushstrokes nearly an inch wide. Fire ink had no effect before it was activated, so Jhin’s brushwork would not hurt Sett yet as he painted serpentine golden lines starting at his wrists and coiling around his arms, weaving and criss-crossing down his back, and spiraling into a beautiful pattern on his chest with a symbol at the solar plexus. Jhin paused to admire his work and its canvas.

Lifting the tip of the brush from the symbol, Jhin whispered, “Ignite,” instantly transforming the ink into a brilliant red. He knew immediately that the efforts he had put into the intricate calligraphy had been worthwhile when he saw Sett writhing and drawing heaving breaths through his teeth as the ink seared his skin.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Jhin couldn’t help but voice his exhilaration.

“It’s supposed to.” Sett sounded composed. “But you can do better than that. Unless you’re ready to answer me already.”

“You will sing for me again before I’m through with you.” Fire ink never lasted as long as Jhin wished it did. He watched the lines disappear, leaving nothing but smooth skin behind.

“Is that really all you want from me? Not very hands-on with your artwork.”

Sett was wrong about that. Unfamiliar fear fresh in his memory, Jhin knew he couldn’t take the bait; he couldn’t make Sett into one of those artworks. “I don’t need to touch you to get you to perform your part.”

It would be so easy to allow himself to touch. It would hurt when he did, but it already hurt to prevent himself from doing so against all his impulses. But if he touched Sett, he didn’t think he’d be able to stop himself short of killing him.

“But a sculptor has to touch the clay…” Sett’s voice was low, almost sensual, “a musician, his instrument.”

The temptation was too much to endure. In a panicked attempt to make it stop, Jhin backhanded Sett across the face with his prosthetic right hand.

He hit harder than he meant to. The sharp knuckles slashed four parallel lines into Sett’s cheek, drawing blood. It was just a few drops, but seeing their vibrance broke Jhin at last.

“What a beautiful color. Dark crimson, like his hair,” Jhin breathed. He felt lost, like he was entering a sort of trance, hardly talking to Sett any longer. “It fits the composition so well…”

He removed the glove from his real hand and traced his fingertips over the cuts on Sett’s face, then slid them under his mask to taste the blood. The heat of Sett’s skin and blood were unbearable.

“I tried to resist it, but the canvas calls for more, I must see more!” Jhin continued, tormented and feverish.

“Hah, take your time.”

Jhin darted to one of the walls and picked out a four-tailed, iron-tipped flail. The implement was delicate but sharp, meant to slice skin, not break bones. Perfect.

Each lash left a set of four flawless parallel lines of liquid red before they started trickling and bleeding into each other, ruining the geometry. Enthralled, Jhin struck again to see those perfect lines once more, and then again and again. He tried over and over, yet they were always spoiled so quickly, forcing him to keep striking. The groans that Sett’s clenched teeth failed to contain only added fervor to Jhin’s crazed symphony of blood.

Even though doing so felt agonizing to Jhin, he allowed his real fingers to trail down Sett’s bleeding chest. Jhin covered Sett’s eyes with his prosthetic hand because he couldn’t let him see his face as he removed his mask to lick some of the blood dripping down his stomach. Jhin replaced the mask over his feral countenance and pressed himself into Sett’s burning skin, gripping his hair with his left hand. He pulled forcefully until Sett’s neck was angled so that Jhin could hear him breathing in his ear.

He held Sett in place and dug the keen fingertips of his prosthetic hand into the back of Sett’s right shoulder, breaking the skin. Jhin then began dragging them down Sett’s back, his fingers leaving bloody, torturously slow lacerations in their wake, much deeper than the cuts from the flail. He could feel Sett’s body straining against his. He heard - and felt - Sett’s ragged breaths, the moans of pain wrung involuntarily from somewhere deep. All these vicarious sensations and sounds made shivers ripple down Jhin’s scalp and spine, overwhelming him with sheer anguished exultation. His own breathing started to come out in labored pants.

As if noticing his agitation, Sett mirrored his earlier line, his voice hoarse but poised. “Hurts… doesn’t it?”

“Why would that hurt me?,” asked Jhin, even though he knew Sett was right once again.

“Because you just can’t help yourself, can you?” Sett sneered. “You’re not as subtle as you might think. I think you always feel what your subjects feel, and you feel it deeply.”

“And what makes you say that?”

“Because I heard you, you know,” Sett continued more quietly, brushing his lips against Jhin’s ear. “You were screaming, too, at the end.”

“What curious delusions your mind can conjure up when it’s delirious from pain,” Jhin gloated. A lie, meant to rile Sett up.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

He applauded the way that, more than any of his other subjects, Sett never lost his nerve. Jhin thoroughly enjoyed the man’s prideful taunts that awakened his own deeper, crueler impulses.

More so on a whim than in retaliation, Jhin repeated the same excruciating movement with the front of Sett’s chest, this time driving the sharpened points of his mechanical fingers into his collarbones before clawing down.

“Don’t pass out on me now.” He could see Sett’s face, and it delighted him especially to draw his fingers over places he had already injured and to hear Sett cry out.

When Sett spoke again, his voice didn't falter. “Face it, you’re fighting a losing battle here.”

His unyielding gaze was set on Jhin, whose frenzied exhilaration had him shuddering and breathing rapidly. Sett’s eyes felt like they were piercing through his mask to see his hunger, his bloodcrazed, maniacal grin, even the little hairs that now stood on end all over his body.

“This… this is the intoxication I seek to achieve when I perform!”

“But for whatever reason, you won’t kill or maim me, I don’t think you have it in you. And without your magic, you can’t hurt me enough to break me,” Sett’s mouth betrayed a hint of a devilish smirk. “Looks like watching might just break you.”

It was unbelievable how Jhin was the one pushed to his limits, resorting to alchemy again. He unrolled an old-fashioned leather-bound medical kit from one of the stone-carved tables and prepared a syringe.

“What are you putting in me this time? Taking my powers again?” Sett did not look intimidated.

“I guess you’ll have to find that out for yourself,” Jhin said, amused, as he injected the serum into the side of Sett’s arm. Sett took an unusually deep breath in and out and seemed to lose some of the tension in his muscles as the draught took effect, but didn't react otherwise.

“Fine, do as you will, just tell me on whose orders you captured me!”

Suddenly reinvigorated, Jhin got up close to Sett’s ear and whispered, “On yours,” drawing out the sounds with stomach-churning satisfaction.

“What the hell do you mean?” Sett growled. Outside of grudgingly vocalizing his pain, this was the first time today his voice sounded anything less than composed, and Jhin revelled in that fact. Time for a test.

“Hush now.” Jhin put a finger to Sett’s lips. “I answered your question, so it’s my turn to be asking the questions. Why did you really come here?”

“Because I wanted to hear your violin again.” Perfection. Sett stared wide-eyed as he heard the words that just rolled off his own lips.

“How come? What was it like last time?” Jhin asked with exaggerated interest.

“It was… beautiful.” Sett looked increasingly bewildered.

“What did it feel like?” Jhin knew the answer very well because he’d tested the spells extensively. Yet it would give him a dark kind of pleasure to hear it from Sett himself.

Sett paused. “It hurt.”

Even this simple statement moved Jhin profoundly, having been plucked out of Sett against his will.

“Describe it,” Jhin commanded. Knowing now that the apothecary’s serum worked as he had hoped, he made sure to immediately follow Sett's words with new questions, forcing him to respond before he could interrupt.

“The pain followed the melody.”

Jhin noticed the shift in Sett’s demeanor - he was no longer smug and sarcastic. His voice was quieter and sounded ragged and sincere, as if the words were being ripped from his soul.

“It moved as you worked the strings. It grew as the melody grew. Until it became nearly unbearable.”

“Nearly?” Jhin smiled cruelly and raised a brow behind the mask. Though Sett could not see his face, Jhin made sure that he could hear the sneer in his voice.

Sett cast his gaze downward and set his jaw. He spoke slowly, as if doing so exerted him greatly. “For most of it… until the end, and then it was… completely unbearable.”

“Good boy. Shhhh,” Jhin shushed the questions on Sett’s lips with his fingers. With mock gentleness, he asked, “Now then, if it hurt so bad, why do you want me to do it again?”

“It sated the hunger like little else can.” Sett’s eyes were ablaze with rage and agony when they met Jhin’s, as if the disgrace was too much for him to endure. “What are you doing to me? Some sort of spell to humiliate me, make me obey you?”

“Not quite. This one can’t bend you to my will or force you to say humiliating things.” Jhin hummed. “Not unless… they are things that you already believe. It simply helps you speak your mind.”

“Now, Sett, this is important.” Jhin lifted Sett’s chin up with the iron grip of his prosthetic hand. He had only ever called him by name once prior, moments before unleashing his greatest cruelty. “You remember the finale of our last performance, don’t you?”

“Stop that!” Sett snarled as his face recoiled from Jhin’s hand.

“That’s alright, you don’t need to answer this one - I know that you remember it if you can recall hearing my voice at the end, as you said yourself.”

“I knew it wasn’t a delusion, you bastard.” His words were biting and he wore a scowl, but his scorched gaze was the most vulnerable Jhin had ever seen on him.

“But tell me this - what did it feel like when I released your power and forced you to hit back after I hurt you for so long?”

“Fuck. I hated that last shot. Hated waiting for it.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Hated being forced to hold on to the feeling of it.”

“Answer the question.” Jhin’s words were level but relentless.

“It felt good. Fuck.” Sett’s voice sounded broken. “Better than anything short of surviving when you were sure you wouldn’t.”

“Never imagined you were such a poet.”

For once, Sett seemed to be lost for words, suffering the insult without offering a clever response as Jhin stroked the side of his face and tossed a crimson lock away from his eyes.

“Jhin…” Jhin had never heard Sett utter his name before. “Why? Why didn’t you kill me or ruin my body?”

“You… really don’t remember?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It was on your orders. We…”

“No, not like that,” his voice had an acute urgency to it. “Take the poison and answer me honestly.”

“And why would I do such a thing?”

“Please.”

Please. Jhin knew he couldn’t bear to kill him, but he’d never figured out if he wanted to see him broken or not. Wouldn’t it feel right for Sett to be the only one he was incapable of subduing? Would it feel better to know he’d been the one to bring him to his knees?

Please. Jhin had always detested subjects who begged and pleaded, for they did not understand, and he had to elevate them by force to be worthy of his grand designs.

Until now.

Please. Jhin’s every nerve was alight with the resounding of the word he dared not hope to hear out of one like him. For Sett was not begging for reprieve. He implored to understand Jhin’s vision, and he had earned as much. “You know that still means I’ll continue asking more from you.”

“Not like there’s anything I can do about that.”

Jhin took a second syringe from the kit on the table and injected his real arm. A shuddered breath left him as the effects kicked in. “Ask me again,” his voice came out surprisingly soft.

“I know from my sources that you’re good at what you do. But I also know that you’re always more loyal to your own inner instincts and ideas of art than you are to anyone who pays you. So, what was it within you that made you treat me as you did? Why didn’t you leave any marks on me then, and why didn’t you try to kill me today, despite having no further obligation to me?”

“Because…” the words felt like a flood threatening to drown Jhin as they started flowing out unbidden, “you are art by a greater artist. My subjects are my canvases and I use them as I will, creating beauty from ugliness and predictability. But when I beheld you, I recognized the work of revered genius, already a masterpiece. I could not bear to mar that. I have no right.” Jhin understood now why his interrogation had shaken Sett so. It ached to have the truth pulled from him, sensual yet terrifying.

“Been called an abomination before, never a masterpiece...” Sett smirked but seemed devoid of scorn this time. “What happened when we first met?”

“I had witnessed many of your fights, but I had never met you until some time after you’d started leading the pits. One night a… performance happened to be at an underground auction you attended with your underlings. My work had me taking care of one of the other factions’ henchmen. There was a showmatch between two of the fighters being sold, so I lingered after my scene was done. They weren’t meant to kill each other, but they ended up delivering a gruesome and pointlessly beautiful display of resolve and viscera. And there you were, on a secluded balcony, watching the bloodshed as if nothing else existed. I approached you wearing another face and commented that the struggle had brought forth the most sublime elements of humanity from the poor souls. I think you must have sniffed out that I wasn’t there for you and yours, or were perhaps bored to death with everyone around you feeding you little other than flattery and polite prattle, so you indulged my chatter about my grislier artistic fascinations.”

“Hah, sounds about right.”

“We talked and you… took me back to your estate. You dismissed your guards and whatever flesh had been offered you for the night. We shared dark wine and you told me that even as they were being bought and sold, those fighters from earlier seemed freer than you were. That in your position you made it a point to accept any challenge, yet because of your reputation few would come forth anymore, and none were worthwhile. That you’d wished you might experience the freedom and exhilaration of a true deathmatch once more. I suggested that while a deathmatch might be foolish, perhaps your thirst might be quenched if you were tested in a different way, and I offered my assistance. You felt it wouldn’t help unless you didn’t know it was coming - hence, the memory poison.”

“So, I hired you?”

Jhin shook his head.

“Wait, then… what was in it for you?”

“You keep asking as if you don’t already know…” but Jhin was powerless to stop the tide. “To watch up close that masterpiece that is your grit. To see how much you could take when I hurt you. And to know what it feels like when you hit back after being forced to the limit.”

Abruptly, Jhin heard noises of boots treading loudly in the nearby rooms and corridors. What were they doing here? Not yet…

“You must run if you can,” he whispered to Sett as he frantically started looking for the keys to his shackles.

Jhin had just managed to unlock Sett’s ankles and was working on his wrists.

Just as he was a click away from setting him free, three fully armed Noxian soldiers barged into the room. There was no time anymore. He pulled back the key without unlocking Sett’s chained hands.

“We got the prisoner from down the hall,” a voice yelled from the corridor.

“There’s another one in here, it seems,” one of the nearby soldiers yelled back.

“We were told there would only be one,” another murmured.

“I didn’t expect to see you people in here so soon,” Jhin interjected. “The play was not supposed to be for another two months yet.”

“Plans change.” One of the soldiers regarded him tersely.

“So, you work for Noxus?” a glowering Sett growled at Jhin over the commotion.

“It’s just business,” Jhin retorted shakily, torn between the effects of the serum and self preservation.

Something vulnerable stirred in Sett’s chest, threatening to spill out in an attempt to reach Jhin.

Jhin tossed the keys to the soldier who’d spoken to him earlier.

“Take him away,” Jhin found a steadier voice.

Sett felt a pang of stinging betrayal and the return of that same bitter certainty that had accompanied him all along. Of course that man had other plans. Sett was never valued by humans as anything other than mere spectacle. Only as good as his strength, holding on to anything he’d gained in life by keeping it within reach of his fists as they looked on from a safe distance, cautious, calculating. Sett gritted his teeth again. Of course he had sold him out. Why would he be any different?

Jhin felt the surge of a suffocating emotion he could not name as he watched the three Noxians unchain Sett, only to use their numbers to overwhelm him and roughly shove him face down onto the floor, pinning him down with boots on his shoulder blades. Fangs bared, Sett looked crazed like a wounded beast as they collared and bound him. He gave Jhin one final, hateful look before being dragged out of the room.

“Time to go, Jhin,” the soldier from earlier stayed behind to bark his orders. “Pack up, we’re sailing tonight.”

Chapter Text

Sylas’s guts nearly turned inside out as he retched into the grimy wooden bucket at the side of his cell below deck. Again. They'd barely fed him, and he’d already vomited at least a dozen times, so he was at a loss as to how there could still be anything remaining in there; he found it funny almost, though he couldn’t risk upsetting his stomach further by laughing.

This was his only his second time on a ship and he already hated it.

Imprisonment, on the other hand - that was deeply familiar to him. Shackles, darkness, hunger. All of them the simple realities of his last decade and a half in Demacia; the longer half of his lifetime. One of the usual components was missing now, though - solitude.

The other prisoner was sitting with his back leaned against the farthest corner of their dark makeshift cell. Like Sylas, the man’s hands and ankles were bound in chains, feet attached to a heavy iron ball, a massive collar weighing heavily on his shoulders and collarbones. The hood of a threadbare umber cloak fell low over his eyes, casting even deeper shadows over his face. The cloak matched the one the soldiers had covered Sylas in to avoid suspicion along their voyage; it clashed with the other prisoner’s well-tailored off white trousers and nice shoes. How’d someone wearing clothes like a noble’s end up captured here alongside him?

Even in the scant light, Sylas could tell by his outlines that the man was of imposing stature and strength. He also seemed enviably unaffected by seasickness.

Despite all this, the man seemed to be in worse shape than Sylas was. His broad shoulders were slightly hunched and his head rested wearily back against the wall. He wore nothing but the collar and cloak from the waist up, and Sylas could see that his chest was caked in blood and dirt.

Sylas hesitated to approach, and the man remained still and silent. He didn’t even attempt to move when a crewmember came by their cell with some moldy bread and what smelled like sour, watered down ale (the smell made bile rise in Sylas’s throat).

But in the brief light cast through the bars by the crewmember’s flickering candle, Sylas saw that scores of unhealed cuts - some shallow, most not - streaked the man’s skin, intertwining like threads in a fabric, dirt and debris embedded in them. Had they dragged him along the floor to take him away? Judging by the depth of some of the cuts, he'd already been injured at that point. Sylas winced.

Though the man seemed to pay them no mind, those wounds were definitely starting to fester. Rich or not, he needed help - in Sylas’s experience, solitude and boredom were worse than hunger and darkness by a long shot, so he preferred to avoid losing his new cellmate if he could. Even the thought of standing up on two legs made him nauseous, however, so instead he moved towards the corner of the cell on his hands and knees. Sylas didn’t even know if the ale had enough alcohol in it to be of any help, but they had no other water and he needed to clean out the debris. He tore off a strip of his own cloak and wetted it. He wrapped the cloth around his fingers, reaching for one of the dirty cuts on the man’s shoulder.

“Don’t touch me,” a hand snapped shut around Sylas’s forearm with unlikely swiftness given the man’s condition. A glimmer of something wild flashed in the stranger’s amber eyes before the hollow look returned to them.

Sylas let him be.

***

The soldiers had kept the two of them separate from the rest of the group that had sailed with them. Shortly upon their arrival at what Sylas assumed was one of Noxus’s ports, they had moved him and his unnamed companion, still bound, into a covered wagon, which had in turn taken them to an enormous coliseum via an inconspicuous side entrance. The building’s sheer size rivaled any of the palaces of Demacia, but the architecture lacked any of the characteristic Demacian embellishments such as polished marble or ornamental decorations, opting instead for sandstone, concrete, and exposed steel spikes. A fitting testament to Noxus’s notorious brutality.

After a series of stone corridors, the two of them were pushed onto the arena floor, a tall iron gate clicking shut behind them, leaving the rest of the group out of view. The place was massive, with an expansive round floor covered in sand and steep tall sandstone stands that could likely fit many thousands of spectators.

All of it was empty save for two men. One was standing in the middle of the arena floor, the other reclining in a carved wooden seat located on a grand platform overlooking the arena, shaded from the midday sun by a thick red fabric canopy.

“These are the prisoners?” asked the man in the arena. He had the look of a general, tall and broad, speaking and carrying himself commandingly, heavy steel armor and all. He wore a narrow red cloak and no helmet over his black hair and severe dark eyes, his face marked by scars and lines of experience. Someone must have signaled their acknowledgement from out of view behind the gate because the man in the arena nodded in turn, looking over toward the platform.

“My brother has graced my humble arena with his presence today, you better not make him look bad.” The man from the platform smirked. There might have been some familial similarity about these two, facial features and dark hair, but outside of that this one seemed like the polar opposite of the other’s serious and stern demeanor. He was casually twirling a curved dagger around his fingers with his feet resting on a nearby table. Despite the distance, Sylas also noticed the prominent intertwining dark lines tattooed onto his jaw.

The man in the arena didn’t appear to note the other’s words. “Show me your resolve. Win, and you might get your freedom back,” he regarded Sylas and his companion directly. “Fight!”

Sylas turned to face his companion, unsure how to proceed. The cloaked man was staring at the general with what seemed like stunned disbelief, but made no move towards Sylas. Sylas felt a visceral disgust at the thought of obeying, but it would be a really bad idea to start his defiance so early on, he just knew it. He had to be strategic. But he really didn’t want to hurt that man any further as he was already in rough shape. On the other hand, he also couldn’t risk being too complacent - even wounded, someone that strong could be a threat in a fight. The seconds dragged on.

Stalling didn’t get Sylas anywhere, though, as the other man still refused to make even a single move against him. Sylas would have assumed that it was because the man’s injuries were too dire to fight, except he remembered how quickly he’d grabbed Sylas’s arm when he’d tried to help clean his wounds, and thought that there must also be another reason he wasn’t fighting.

Sighing, Sylas decided he had to go for it. He dashed towards the other prisoner, closing the distance, dragging the iron ball behind his feet. He almost hesitated when he saw the other man keep his hands down, feeling even more reluctant to hurt him. Almost. The greatest respect and mercy he could show under these circumstances would be to finish the fight quickly.

He whipped his right foot behind the other prisoner’s calf, causing the ball and chain to swing and wrap around the man’s feet, landing a heavy hit into his shin. Sylas used the moments his companion was off balance to help him trip and fall backwards. The other prisoner did not raise his hands even as Sylas tackled him on the ground and pulled the chain connecting his shackled wrists tight against the other’s throat. Not hard enough to really strangle him, but at least enough to indicate his victory, he hoped.

It was deeply unsettling that the other prisoner still made no attempt to resist. He just looked at Sylas with his empty eyes. His breathing didn’t sound labored, but Sylas could see the veins on his neck bulging around the chain. Sylas adjusted his hands ever so slightly to give him just a bit of slack, hoping no one else would notice.

That small movement caused part of Sylas’s palm to brush against the other man’s skin, and Sylas felt an influx of power, his eyes widening. Sylas’s magic allowed him to briefly seize and use other people’s power when he touched them. He hadn’t expected to find any within his companion - how wrong he had been! How could it be that the man had so much raw power, yet wouldn’t fight?

Time seemed to move through honey.

“Enough,” the stern voice of the Noxian in the arena announced at last. Sylas let go immediately. “I’ll take the Demacian mage,” he turned towards his brother, “and the Ionian.”

His brother frowned from above, but another, familiar voice spoke from behind the gate first.

“The Ionian wasn’t part of the deal.”

“You overstate your importance, Demon - you aren’t in Navori any longer,” the tattooed brother scoffed from above. Though he didn’t seem too happy about it himself, he added, “The general takes what he pleases.”

“Take them away,” the man in the arena gestured towards the gate, and four soldiers emerged from behind them. Two grasped Sylas, one by each arm, and began escorting him back towards the gate with all the gentleness he would have expected.

The other two grabbed his companion, still on the ground, by his elbows and started dragging him away, too. He struggled to his feet, which the soldiers must have interpreted as resistance, because they responded by clutching at his cloak and collar. The scuffle resulted in one of the soldiers pulling off his hood and cloak entirely, revealing dark crimson hair. And two fluffy vastayan ears.

“Hold the fuck up,” the other brother yelled from above, abandoning his previously relaxed posture in favor of leaning over the edge in tense agitation, “is that who I think it is?”

“You know this one, Draven?” the man in the arena responded contemplatively.

“Follow me, NOW,” Draven replied. Sylas heard no more of their conversation as the soldiers finally succeeded in dragging the two of them away.

***

Draven’s hand had hardly finished shutting and locking the door of his secluded office when he turned suspiciously to their secretive Ionian ally, “I think you have some explaining to do, Jhin.”

The main purpose of the office was to hold money and paperwork related to the running of the Reckoners’ arena, but over the years its walls had turned into a makeshift exhibition of Draven’s various weapons and trophies from his own fights. It often left his visitors intimidated, and he liked that - perhaps that way the masked Demon would finally get the message not to cross them without Draven having to be rude enough to put hands on a guest. His brother thought they had enough to gain from the man’s alliance, but Draven wasn’t so sure they could even trust him that far. Draven took a seat behind his desk.

“How do you know that fighter, brother?” Darius cut in when the masked man did not respond.

“I don’t know him personally,” Draven explained. It was a rare treat to be able to supply intel that his brother was unaware of, but he was too preoccupied with his suspicions to enjoy gloating about it. “But you remember the fighting pits we built in all the cities along the shores of Ionia we had occupied after the war?”

Darius nodded.

“And remember how, when we withdrew, we slowly lost control of them to local thugs?”

“Get to the point,” Darius scoffed.

“That man’s the half-beast of Ionia, the one behind all that. Started out as a fighter at first, became known across all the fighting pits for overthrowing… killing the guy we had running one of the Navori pits. Sources said he kept going, now he owns and runs all the pits on that shore, among other things.” Draven turned away from Darius to regard Jhin again, “You captured him, but told us nothing of that sort. You can forgive a guy for wondering if you were entirely loyal to us, given you were trying to keep him to yourself?”

“I… didn’t know who he was,” Jhin said simply. “I captured him for my own entertainment.” His voice betrayed no uncertainty, and neither did his face with that damned mask on.

“So let me get this straight.” Draven slammed his fist on the table, causing a heavy coin to roll off the edge and land rattling at his feet. “You captured the goddamn boss of the entire goddamn Ionian underworld… just for fun… without even knowing who he is… and you expect me to believe that?”

Before Jhin could even attempt to explain himself, Darius cut in again, “Let him be, Draven. He may be… eccentric, but he’s brought us valuable prisoners, if unwittingly.”

Draven had underestimated Darius’s excitement to be in possession of someone he saw as having taken something from him. Now, instead of becoming rightfully suspicious of Jhin, Darius was all but eager to give him a pass for having brought the guy in. Draven rolled his eyes. Darius liked to think himself the strategist, but Draven saw through it. Up until two minutes ago, Darius could care less about having lost control of the fighting pits years ago. His brother’s mind was moved at least as much by bloodlust as by the desire to extract valuable information. That Draven somewhat understood - for his part, it would be fun to rumble in the arena with the man who’d brutally defeated so many of his peers. Perhaps Darius felt similarly about his political prisoners.

“Hah. I suppose if anyone were to pull something like that, it would be someone like him,” Draven conceded tartly. “But I don’t buy it! I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

***

Jhin’s seething, helpless rage threatened to devour him, sprouting hateful tendrils into the heart of Noxus. Alone at last in the spartan room they’d provided, he stared unseeing through the window overlooking the street outside the Reckoners’ arena. During his previous visits, he’d found himself intrigued by Noxian architecture, sparing to a fault in its use of detailing and brutally efficient, yet somehow moving. Now it was all but invisible to him as he rummaged through his trunk in need of something to do with his hands. He found the box where he’d put Sett’s knuckle dusters and jewelry.

He’d had no choice when the Noxians came in weeks ahead of schedule, he couldn’t risk making them any more suspicious unless he had a death wish. He sought grounding in the weight of the heavy golden bracelets against his palms. Even without recognizing Sett, they wouldn’t have let him go as he would have seen them, and they’d consider that enough of a threat to kill over. Jhin turned Sett’s rings over and over in his hands. He had failed to let Sett escape in time, so his safest bet had been to pass him off as another prisoner alongside the one he’d agreed to deliver, and to try to get him back later, slim as that chance was. Or maybe they might have let him fight in the arena to win back his freedom - a prospect that might even have excited Sett on some primal level. He would have hated Jhin for his betrayal regardless, but living and hating him was preferable to the alternative.

But no, that Draven had to have overheard enough about the usurper of the fighting pits to recognize him without ever having laid eyes on him before. Of course Noxus held a grudge over that, and Jhin had delivered Sett right to them. General Darius, Hand of Noxus, held him among his prisoners now.

Unwelcome visions of the general’s crude, heathen hands on Sett assaulted Jhin’s mind incessantly and he saw red. Darius was brutal, and he would want information about the Ionian underworld from Sett. Information that he wouldn’t be able to pry out quickly or easily.

He wouldn’t kill Sett.

He wouldn’t.

But he might get damn close to it to find out what he needed, it was only a matter of time. Jhin had to work much more quickly than he previously imagined.

***

“Clean that one up. It’ll be your hide if he dies before the general can get the information he needs out of him,” Darius overheard voices from one of the rooms down in the medical quarter while walking down the hall of the arena building. That must be where the injured prisoner was.

“Strap him down,” another replied. Clamoring noises. Darius rushed towards the sounds.

“You’ve waited too long to bring him. The cuts are already closing over the grime and putrefying inside. Dangerous,” that one was probably the medic. “We need to cut all of it out. ”

“I’ll take care of that,” Darius stepped in.

“General!” The startled men saluted him with deference. “We need to attend to those wounds so they don’t rot and kill him, and then we’ll send him to you for interrogation.”

“I said, I’ll take care of it.”

“Sir!” they all saluted in acknowledgement.

“You’re all dismissed. Leave,” Darius commanded. The medic seemed reluctant, but none of them cared to disobey a direct order from the Hand of Noxus, so they shuffled out quickly.

At last, Darius got the chance to take a closer look at his unexpected prisoner, who had so far remained silent. The half-breed strapped to the stone table seemed almost entirely human save for those extra ears atop his head. He was fairly large for a human, all lean bulk, and tall enough that he would probably tower over most of Darius’s soldiers. Though he did look strong enough to be a fighter, he seemed younger than Darius and had few visible scars - he couldn’t see any at first glance, though he couldn’t be sure with how thoroughly the man’s skin had been lacerated. He seemed on the verge of passing out. Darius had a hard time believing that this upstart was the one who had defeated not only scores of wretches in the pit, but even the Noxian commander stationed there.

“You got a name, mutt?” Darius did not meet the glare he received in return, instead eyeing the sharp, sterilized knives on the side table. “You can call me Darius.”

Unperturbed by the lack of a response, Darius picked up a knife and looked for a place to start. His men must have struggled to capture this one, that was for sure, but they wouldn’t have been the ones to injure him initially, or he would have been informed of a scuffle. The cuts were from before he was apprehended, then. Was that what Jhin had meant by entertainment? He wasn’t known for letting his entertainment walk away alive, so this was highly unusual.

“How do you know Jhin?” Darius sliced into one of the festering gashes near the right collarbone, releasing pus and blood. He pulled the previously coagulated edges of the wound apart as the half-breed writhed into his bindings. Using some gauze soaked in a dark solution, he cleaned out the grime, ignoring the jerky movements of his straining prisoner.

“I have to keep cutting whether you talk or not,” Darius carved the next infected wound open, a deep one just beneath the ribs on the right side. “But my hand might slip more often if you don’t,” instead of a fresh cleaning gauze, he forcefully thrust his finger into the bleeding cut.

The man’s back arched, mouth flying open in a soundless scream. Once content that he had made his point, Darius cleaned the cut and removed the debris as before and found the next spot needing intervention, a long wound down the sternum and stomach, wasting no time before slicing it open.

“There are quite a few of these left,” he mused after the prisoner refused to speak again.

“Jhin,” Darius prodded as he wedged his finger into the newly reopened wound, “the man you were with when we captured you.” This time, the half-breed clenched his teeth and tensed his body to try to keep himself from moving. His eyes squeezed shut and his head flew back once Darius pressed further.

“Your touch is gentler than his, you need to step up your game,” the prisoner huffed a bitter laugh. “He was giving me the royal treatment, too.”

“Why would he do that?” Darius’s quick response must have betrayed his curiosity. He kept working on peeling away the coagulated dirt with the knife, this time without aggravating the cuts further, at least not on purpose.

“Who knows?”

It was too early to jump to conclusions. The fact that Jhin had treated this man in an atypical way didn’t necessarily mean he had been lying about not knowing his position. Had to find out more, perhaps with cunning.

“Pretty face for a fighter,” Darius smirked. “Not a face that’s seen actual war. But I can see why he likes you.”

“Nah, I think that’s just you. You’re the one who won’t shut up about my face,” the prisoner taunted back. “I get it, though. I pity the poor souls whose last sight in this world was your ugly mug.”

Instead of responding to his cheap provocation, Darius leaned closer. “You want to know the difference between me and a self-taught amateur like Jhin?”

He ran the bloody knife down the bound man’s throat, allowing the blade to just barely graze the skin.

“I know where to cut to make you bleed out. And I know how to cut to make sure you don’t,” he looked into his eyes directly. “Your people have a custom of death by a thousand cuts, but I can give you ten thousand and still keep you alive and talking.”

At that, the half-breed took advantage of their close proximity to abruptly and forcefully headbutt Darius. “I still wouldn’t tell you anything, you moron,” he spat in Darius’s face.

Darius wouldn’t respond with heated anger, for doing so would indicate weakness. He needed steel-cold severity to unambiguously demonstrate the consequences of disrespecting him.

“It’s ‘Darius’,” he corrected icily while wiping away the blood dripping from his nose. “Now, about that face…”

Darius grasped the thrashing half-breed’s jaw firmly with one hand, using the knife in the other to carve a deep line across his face, about an inch underneath his eyes. That would certainly leave a scar.

Chapter Text

Sett had been betrayed many, many, many times. He was so used to it that he found himself surprised whenever someone passed on an opportunity to get one over on him. Just part of the job. He really didn’t take it personally. They’d be the ones to regret it once he beat them to a pulp while he felt less than nothing.

This time shouldn’t be any different. Noxus had wanted to get back at him for years, helping them was profitable.

It was just business.

But for some reason, that man’s betrayal just left a bad taste. Had he really allowed himself to be so undone by another? Sett knew better than that. Or, he should, but the raw feeling in his chest said otherwise.

Whatever game the masked man had played at, he was good. How could someone have his intuition and all his senses so thoroughly fooled? Sett’s instincts had known the other man hadn’t wanted him dead or truly destroyed, he had known it so strongly that he’d been willing to gamble his life on it. And all the man’s perverse obsessions had seemed honest. For all the things people usually saw when they looked at Sett - his position, his power, the strength and allure of his body, the taboo of his mixed blood that disgusted them so - had not seemed to concern him. He gazed right through Sett at who he really was… had even seemed excited at what he saw there. Sett hadn’t been able to help trusting him.

It shouldn’t hurt this much. Luring him in with sensations he hadn’t known he needed, forcing him to degrade himself by admitting that he did, only to be tossed away afterwards. The cruelty of it shouldn’t have stunned him as much as it did. Others had been cruel to him before, they just hadn’t known him enough to know where to strike as his violinist did. And what for? Was the missing murderous intent he had intuited simply the product of the man’s plans to turn him in alive later? Had he really needed to dig into Sett’s mind so deeply if Sett had been nothing but cargo to him, like some sick joke?

He wasn’t safe here, he couldn’t afford to just wallow in his misery. It had been a while since Sett’s life had belonged to someone other than himself. To the Noxian he’d dreamt would kill him. With his violinist’s blessing, no less. So he cast everything that hurt - the shame, the fervor of that man’s voice when he’d compared him to artwork, its coldness when calling on his enemies to take him away, the man’s very name - into a deeper corner of his mind and forced himself to return to the numbness of his wounded body.

Rough hands grasped at Sett once more. Pulling, leading. He was tired of resisting.

***

Sylas counted the hours. Noxian prison, Demacian prison, it didn’t matter. Freedom had been so close at hand - his, and that of his fellow mages - and he’d do anything to grasp it, only now it meant submitting himself to bondage, again, and hoping to trick his captors, hoping he could rely on his allies outside. He didn’t even have a way of knowing if he counted correctly. Back in his cell in Demacia, he’d sometimes grow so despondent that days would pass before he knew it, but now he felt so restless that what was probably mere seconds seemed to pass by torturously slowly.

He awaited his chance to talk to the Noxians face to face anxiously but eagerly, even though it would likely be during a very friendly interrogation session. Nothing he hadn’t been through before. He wondered who would be the one to do it - perhaps one of the two he’d already met. Perhaps the general, if words were to be believed, or maybe his brother. Neither of them looked particularly gullible.

Mind racing, he spared a thought for the other prisoner who’d been brought on the ship alongside him, wondering if he’d make it through the day alive. The man’s power intrigued Sylas, but he didn’t know anything else about him, not even his name. The general’s brother had seemed to recognize him somehow, though, so Sylas doubted he’d get another chance to properly meet him once the two of them had been taken and separated by the guards.

Much to Sylas’s surprise, not more than a few hours later, the door clicked open once more, only for his companion from earlier to be dragged in by two pairs of guards, then chained up and left in Sylas’s cell that was promptly locked up again.

Highly unusual and highly suspicious. Hauling them over together was one thing, and he’d been glad to have had someone to share the journey with, albeit not a very talkative someone. But he’d never been kept alongside another, and neither had he heard of it happening to any of the other mages he’d known to have been detained, except in the most crowded conditions. He doubted this was the case now, not for someone who seemed an important prisoner based on how they’d talked about him. Maybe they’d planted him to get more information from Sylas? Even if he wasn’t complicit with their captors, discussing anything with him was a bad idea, really, because it would be twice as likely for his schemes to be found out if just one of them cracked under their questioning. He was not to be trusted anyway, with his rich man’s clothes and aloof silence.

“Hey,” Sylas cursed the softness that remained in his heart, cursed the compassion he felt upon looking at the man’s now bandaged injuries, cursed the relief he felt at seeing him alive again. He could maybe learn some of the man’s secrets without sharing his own, he told himself, but he knew it was a deeper humanity that moved him to reach out again. “Still alive over there?”

“Seems that way,” the man replied after a short pause.

“Hah… I’m honestly glad about that,” Sylas felt himself smile. “I was worried that they’d make me kill you, you know. Or finish the job themselves.”

“You fought well. I don’t hold it against you.”

“Nevermind that, I’m not proud of it either.” Sylas’s chains rattled as he shuffled closer. “Why didn’t you fight back at all?”

“It was pointless. He was lying, I could smell it. He was never gonna let either of us go free, no matter who won,” the other prisoner said dejectedly.

Sylas felt there was still more behind that reckless refusal to resist, but he wasn’t too eager to discuss the situation and his own willingness to spare his opponent either, so he decided not to follow up further.

“The name’s Sett, by the way.”

“Sylas.”

At least it looked like Sett was no longer as adamant about being left well alone, so Sylas tested how far he could move. The cell was small, no more than four paces in any direction, and held little other than two thin and worn, yet clean sleeping mats. His chains were long enough to let him reach Sett’s mat on the opposite side, and he took a seat on the floor next to it, resting his back on the wall.

“Shit, your face…” With how dim the cell was, Sylas only now saw that Sett’s face was all but covered in fresh blood dripping from a deep horizontal gash underneath his eyes that definitely wasn’t there before. “What happened?”

“That would be Darius.” Sett smirked. “The brute from the arena floor,” he added in response to Sylas’s confusion. “Seems he didn’t like my face looking so good.”

They both laughed at that. Sylas could appreciate someone with a sense of humor about their situation; being angry all the time got old.

“Can’t say that he did very much to correct that, unfortunately.” Sylas’s chuckle was light, but he looked Sett up and down carefully. His features were foreign, but his face was striking like carved stone - like it belonged on one of those statues that exalted Demacian kings of legend. Even scarred and covered in blood… Was he really that beautiful, or was it just Sylas’s utter lack of non-hostile human contact playing tricks on him?

***

Sylas knew he must be dreaming, for the soft golden light could not be coming from any of the dingy cells he’d spent his recent decades in. He also knew he was dreaming because his wrists felt light, unencumbered, and he still wore his old mageseeker uniform. Sometimes he still had nightmares of taking innocent souls away just because they, like him, had what Demacia deemed to be unnatural powers.

He realized that as usual he wasn’t in control of his actions in this dream as he looked up in search of his target.

It was Sett.

Reclining in a carved wooden seat that looked like a throne, relaxed and laid-back, he appeared almost entirely different from the dirty, injured, worse-for-wear version he’d met. Still shirtless, though, Sylas’s mind noted, even as he wore heavy golden jewelry and an open sleeveless coat of fine furs. Such marks of riches and nobility typically raised alarms in Sylas, but he didn’t bat an eye, perhaps because his younger self wouldn’t have. Or because he wore them so well.

“You need to come with me,” Sylas heard his own voice say with contempt, “an inferior mongrel like you does not belong out in the streets, threatening the peace with your vile occult powers.”

“Inferior?” Sett appraised him with an arrogant look that made his throat go dry.

He slowly got up from his throne and walked towards Sylas.

“Mind showing me where you find me inferior?” He took Sylas’s hand and placed it on his bare chest. “Point to it.”

Sylas’s eyes snapped open to see Sett shaking him awake. Still disoriented from the dream, his first thought was that he doubted he could find a single inferior thing to point to, even if he looked all day. He immediately felt disgusted with himself, like he was no different from that girl who’d visit him with books in the Demacian dungeons, who just Wouldn’t. Stop. Looking.

“You need to get a grip,” Sett scolded.

That he did. He still hadn’t even figured out how far he could trust Sett, nevermind whether his allure was just a delusion born of Sylas’s solitude.

“W-why? What’s the matter?” Sylas’s voice was still hoarse with sleep.

“Don’t give me that.” Sett looked down at him with a mixture of irritation and concern. “You kept tossing and whimpering in your sleep again. Whatever demons haunt you, you gotta deal with them before our dear Darius uses them to break you.”

Fuck. Whimpering? He was glad the dream hadn’t gone on any further. At least Sett seemed to believe it was nightmares, and he wasn’t about to rob him of that illusion. As the two of them had had little to do over the last couple of days but rot in their cell and talk, they’d grown friendlier with each other, and Sylas had ended up sharing a bit about his past against his better judgment. Nothing pertinent to his current plans, of course, but he did talk about his fifteen year imprisonment, about Demacia’s treatment of mages, and even a bit about his past as their mageseeker dog. That would explain why Sett thought it was some past horror that troubled him - it was even true, in part.

“No need to worry about that,” Sylas chose his words carefully, “I’ve met his like before.”

“Yeah, for all the good that’s done you.” Sett scoffed. “Just look at you. You gotta let me help.”

Sylas was taken aback at the sincerity coming through the annoyance. It appeared that Sett genuinely cared and was offering to help even as he himself was in a heap of trouble. Save for the Demacian girl, he struggled to remember the last time someone had done as much for him. He really disliked lying, at least to good people, but what else was he supposed to do? Freeing himself and his mages hinged on building a web of lies that Sett was better off not knowing, and no amount of confronting his demons would change that. Explaining the real reason why his dream had him in such a state was also out of the question. Which left him with only one option, play along as best he could.

“Help how?”

“Forget Darius for a second. I'll be your Demacian swine,” Sett offered with a wicked half-smile. “Let me play the part, you fight me back with all you’ve got.”

“How would that help?” It sounded like a really bad idea, bringing out those old emotions in front of Sett - even if he just pretended to.

“When someone hurts me, I beat them to a pulp. If I can’t - they run away, someone else kills them - then beating on a target dummy and giving it a piece of my mind also helps,” Sett explained simply, but his eyes darkened a little. “You’re just stuck in what they - what he did to you. You can’t get back at him right now - and you will, once you’re out of this place - but right now you need to let out that fear, that rage. Become unstuck. It’ll be even better than the target dummy, cause I’ll talk back at you.”

“But I don’t want to fight you or hurt you,” Sylas objected genuinely.

“You won’t be able to,” Sett responded matter-of-factly, briefly grabbing hold of both of Sylas’s hands and holding them above his head with one of his. “It’s about what you feel.”

Sylas was still flat on his back on the sleeping mat. He was no weakling, but Sett’s one-armed grip was iron, more than enough to keep him in place.

His stern and self-assured look was not that different from the one he’d given Sylas in his dream.

The look that made his mind go blank. That apparently made him whimper in his sleep.

But it was real. He couldn’t get free if he tried, he was stuck looking up at him like that. It was too much.

Tell him that it won’t work. Stop him. He won’t force it.

Tell him it would be too painful. Lie if you have to.

Tell him something.

Anything.

“Seems our favorite Noxian general is right about one thing - your face is too pretty to hate… I don’t think this will work,” Sylas tried to laugh it off awkwardly, regretting his words already.

“Shut up, I’m being serious!” Sett told him off, but let go of his hands.

Sylas seized the opportunity to sit up. If they were really doing this, he would at least make sure it wasn’t while he was pinned to his bed. Sett rummaged through Sylas’s umber cloak from their sea voyage, now bunched up as his pillow, and tore off a long strip from the bottom. Then, they both stood up.

“Ready?” Sett asked, quietly now, holding the strip close to Sylas’s eyes. After a parched gulp, Sylas nodded. “I won’t go easy, so do or say whatever feels right in return. Say my real name if you want me to stop.”

Sett carefully tied the makeshift blindfold at the back of Sylas’s head. To secure Sylas in place this time, he stepped on each of the chains around his ankles and planted his full weight, making it impossible for Sylas to move his feet. Sett pinned his arms up one-handed and pressed the forearm of his free hand into Sylas’s collarbones to hold him flat against the wall.

“Right back where you belong,” Sett’s friendly, gentle tone was completely gone, replaced by a low growl that caught him off guard.

At first, Sylas only felt heat. All over his face, in his lungs, deep and low in his stomach. He didn’t feel like saying anything, so he just lightly tested Sett’s grip, confirming that he was truly, fully trapped. He’d tried to keep his distance, not wanting to trust Sett, ignoring the disorienting bewilderment he caused him. Unable to turn away, he was now forced to surrender; it felt almost overwhelming to be so vulnerable before someone who was but a stranger mere days ago.

“You thought you could run away from me, didn’t you?” The scorn in Sett’s voice felt sharp. “But I’ll always find you. I’ll always bring you back here.”

It became harder to breathe as he was unable to run from Sett’s clutches, from his scent, from his warmth, from his pretend-harshness. Sylas came close to calling his name to make it stop, but he felt something stirring deeper.

It was the fear that he would truly never be free, that his enemies would always catch up. He wanted to turn away, but he didn’t. A friend wanted to help him through, and he would hate himself if he made a mockery of that. Still no words came, so he just breathed as steadily as he could.

“You wanna be free, I get it. But scum like you should be locked up, or you’ll taint the world with your filthy blood.” The voice became almost unrecognizable, so twisted was it by disgust and loathing that sounded so real.

Sylas stayed silent, but felt himself tensing, straining, pushing back against a grip that remained solid.

“It’s only what you deserve, after all.”

That line hit a bit too close for Sylas. It was almost exactly the same as what he’d been told many times over, almost the same as what he himself had told innocent mages time and time again as he’d captured them for Demacia.

“Fuck you,” he bit back unseeing, unsure whom exactly it was meant for. This time he fought, really fought to free himself, limbs pulling and twitching to no avail.

“Is that all the fight you have in you?” Between the blindfold and the warped hateful words, Sylas could nearly forget who was speaking to him. “Truly pathetic. How did you ever even escape in the first place?”

“I did, and I’ll do it again!” Sylas’s speech grew angrier, rawer. “You and your pig friends can’t stop me, you’re complacent, fat off the kingdom’s coffers!”

“You’re gonna talk back now, is that it? Do I need to put you in your place again?” The forearm on Sylas’s chest moved up to his throat - not choking, but hinting at it. “Do I need to remind you that down here I own you?”

“No one owns me, least of all you, Crownguard swine!” Sylas nearly shouted, continuing to struggle viciously against the hands that held him.

“Really? You think someone would bat an eye over another missing rat with arcane powers?” That cruel laughter couldn’t have been Sett’s… “Honestly, I don’t even know why the king deems it necessary to spare scraps for the likes of you, when I could feed it to my horse.”

“You’ll eat your words,” Sylas spat in the pig’s face, kicking and screaming. “I’ll kill you, Crownguard, and feed your corpse to the rats in these dungeons! I'LL KILL YOU!”

Cursing and hyperventilating, he thrashed violently against everything that trapped him in place with his terror, his rage.

The grip on his hands still held fast, but the other arm released his throat and reached for the blindfold.

“Sylas.” Suddenly, it was Sett again. Sylas could see again, relaxing at the sight of his friend’s concerned expression, his soft voice. “Come back to me.”

Sylas breathed hard as everything washed over him - hate, fear, cathartic wrath, a new rush of shame at being revealed like this. Sett released his hands and feet as soon as he stopped struggling.

“Oh, fuck…” He covered his face with his hands. “I… for fuck’s sake, I spat at you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Sett smiled. “Just promise to do it to Darius when you meet him. I think he likes it.”

Sylas couldn’t help the chuckle that bubbled up in him so spontaneously. Though he felt embarrassed, he realized he also felt so much lighter, as if shackles as heavy as those he’d been lugging on his body for decades had suddenly been lifted from inside his chest.

“Feel better?”

“Yes, I actually do…” Sylas said incredulously. “Thank you,” he added, staring into his friend’s eyes with genuine gratitude.

“Don’t mention it.”

“I gotta ask, though,” Sylas felt calm thoughts start to settle back in. “Some of the things you said. They felt quite… real.”

“That, huh…” It was Sett who looked away this time, some unknown memory casting a shadow over his face. “I may know a thing or two about being hated for your blood.”

Sylas felt like a fool. He cursed himself for not realizing it sooner. They felt real because they were real. When exchanging stories, Sett had talked about his past as a fighter… he’d never mentioned anything like this before, but it was his vastayan ears that instantly got him spotted back at the arena. He doubted that, wherever Sett came from, hybrids like him were treated much better than mages were back in Demacia.

Sett must have read his shock as disbelief, because he went on with a bitter smile, “I know, I know… fancy shoes, what do I know of struggle. But folk back home weren’t too eager to accept a… half-breed like me. Had to crack more than a few skulls to make it happen.”

Sett laughed at the last part, but Sylas could feel the biting resentment when he’d repeated what he’d been called, likely too many times to count. Sylas’s skin crawled at the thought.

Unwavering instinct drove him to throw his arms around Sett. Maybe he was still shaken by the earlier experience, but he wanted to thank him, to protect him from what had been done to him already, to save him from what he’d likely suffer yet before they could even think of getting free… Words were not enough. Sett just stood there stiffly at first - Sylas had forgotten all about his injuries… or maybe he really didn’t like to be touched - but then eased into the embrace.

“Hybrid or not, you’re a human being,” Sylas whispered, refusing to let go just yet. “You don’t deserve any of this either. Thank you, thank you… We’ll find a way out of here.”

***

Ostentatious masquerade balls were one of those Noxian traditions that Darius just didn’t care for. All the grandiose music, the twirling, the finery, all to pretend like they weren’t all wolves underneath. Noxians should be proud of their savage nature, not hide it, he thought; but his station demanded he be in attendance, foolish as he felt in his porcelain jester mask.

“I heard you were quite the dancer, general,” a scarlet-haired woman in a golden volto mask said as she approached. “Care for a round?”

“I’d be a fool to accept. I’m told your spin is lethal to any who see it up close,” Darius hoped in vain that his flattery would save him the obligation.

“If you believe me so dangerous, then you’d be a fool to refuse.” She smiled her familiar sly smile. A wolf grin under the guise of coquettish charm.

“Then I’d be honored.” Darius nodded courteously, offering his arm as etiquette demanded. Used to being blunt and being obeyed, he was already growing tired of speaking so formally.

They joined the other pairs in their structured formation on the softly lit ballroom floor. His back and shoulders felt stiff, but Darius knew the steps and it was enough as his companion danced effortlessly around him.

The graceful dancers spun around as the music swelled, and as Darius carefully leaned down for a dip, his partner whispered a hushed warning into his ear:

“Watch yourself, Darius. Rumors are spreading about your cargo. Someone around you is a fox and I don't know who.”

Darius was already lost in thought as he watched her walk away with a deep formal bow. Petricite… one of Demacia’s greatest strengths and its best kept secret - that’s what his most recent stunt with Jhin's prisoners was all about. Darius could never quite resist an underhanded strategic advantage, but that advantage could easily be undermined if word got out.

He’d first come into contact with the mysterious material when his men had intercepted a Demacian ship in the northern seas transporting imprisoned mages headed for the mines of Freljord. The mages had all been bound and collared in petricite. They’d figured soon after that the material had something to do with suppressing their ability to use magic, but though they’d thoroughly questioned the mages and their wardens, none of them had anything useful to offer about it. It appeared that the true nature and properties of petricite were a mystery even to many of the Demacians who used it.

Darius had had his men seize all the petricite restraints from that ship before disposing of the passengers and vessel. He’d hoped to get one up on Demacia, and any slip-ups that could have revealed that Noxus was responsible for the ship’s fate would have negated any such advantage. They’d done worse before… but at least this time around he had been glad to get his hands on someone who knew more with relatively little hassle, not to mention another, unexpected test subject. He had to find this fox quickly, or it could all have been for nothing.

“Being Hand of Noxus sure must have its perks.” Draven approached him with a cocky smirk, snapping him out of his reverie. “What I wouldn’t give for a dance with the lady Katarina!”

“I see you have your mind on the important things, as always,” Darius scoffed playfully at Draven’s lupine mask, “you dirty dog.”

“You’re just mad that one of us isn’t a charmless bastard,” Draven cackled in turn.

“Walk with me,” Darius wasn’t asking, leading the way into the ballroom’s balcony overlooking the city as he spoke. “If I have to endure another dance, I’m going to have to have someone killed.”

“Case in point, brother!” Draven seemed to grow ever more amused at Darius’s furrowed brow and poorly concealed annoyance. Despite giving him a hard time, Draven followed.

Darius immediately felt more at ease in the chill and quiet of the evening outside. After taking a moment to cast his eyes over the flickering lights of the city, he started down the sweeping staircase into the vineyard gardens. They walked along manicured alleys under wooden arches covered in winding grapevines and roses that looked nearly black in the dusk.

“I might need your help smoking out a fox,” Darius jumped in right away, just as soon as he felt they were far enough out of earshot of everyone else.

“Oh good, I guess you’ve finally come around to seeing things my way, then?”

“I just have it on good authority that someone is on to us, but I don’t know who it is.”

“What, so you trust in Katarina’s rumors, but you don’t trust my very reasonable suspicions of someone who’s very clearly suspicious?”

“Are you really still going on about that? You know I trust you over anyone else. I just don’t think that hunch is a good one - we need an Ionian for this to work, and he hasn’t failed us yet.”

“No one’s failed us until they do,” Draven scoffed. “He’s hiding something and I don’t trust him.”

“Everyone has secrets,” Darius bit back as he sank down into a sequestered ornamental wooden bench. Draven followed suit. “His record as an assassin is impeccable, and he’s delivered everything as promised. That’s all I care about.”

“So it doesn’t bother you that he could be working in cooperation with the Ionian mafia, then? You know, the guys we are trying to replace? What brilliant and exceptional assassin does not know the powers that be in his area of operation?”

“It’s called the underworld for a reason, those people don’t exactly advertise their power.”

“Not that one, though - I recognized their half-beast boss from hearsay alone, and I don’t even live there!” Draven seemed livid. “But by all means, go ahead and follow up on all the other leads we have on who might be betraying us.” He crossed his arms and looked away.

“What am I even supposed to be suspecting him of, exactly?” Darius said after a pause, somewhat taken aback by the strength of his brother’s conviction.

“Just as I said, I think he’s probably in league with the boss, because they seemed to know each other, and Jhin’s story doesn’t add up for me.”

“Let’s say that were true. They are working together, and so their master plan involves… letting us capture one of them, indefinitely… because?”

“In case you forgot, Jhin didn’t want to leave him with us.”

“Then why did he bring him in as a prisoner to begin with?”

“I thought it was your job to get that information out of him?”

“He’s not exactly been the most helpful or eager to cooperate, as you might imagine.”

“I can’t believe that little half-breed’s giving you a run for your money. Have your interrogation talents dulled?” Draven mocked gleefully.

“Drop it.” Darius was starting to get peeved himself. “Regardless, what would you have me do? How do I go about confirming your suspicions?”

“Hah, now we’re talking!” Draven’s face instantly transformed into a mischievous grin. “I might be able to help with that.”

Draven pulled something heavy and golden from his pocket and dropped it into Darius’s palm. Darius examined it - it looked like a collar-style necklace of fine craftsmanship, though one of the rings near the clasp seemed to have broken open.

“I found this in the arena the day the prisoners were first brought in. It must have fallen off during the scuffle with the guards.”

“I’m listening.”

“We just need to catch Jhin off guard and see if he recognizes it. If he does, we’ll have reason to believe that the two of them are a bit more closely involved than we thought. This is just the thing to prove it.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then you’ll just have to live with being right, I guess,” Draven taunted. “Come on, brother - just follow my lead and let me play the fool. Then you be the judge of his reaction.”

“That… might just work. But are you even sure it’s his?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Darius - between the mob boss and the peasant mage who’s been in prison for fifteen years, who’s more likely to have worn a solid gold necklace?”

***

After making their preparations, Draven and Darius had returned to the ballroom, awaiting their quarry. Darius had resumed his position at the head of the long chamber, where he could be greeted by all the underlings and diplomats he wished to avoid - served him right for all his ambition of a high-ranking title, rather than keeping to where a soldier belonged.

Draven himself lurked around the refreshments, scanning the guests while reclining on one elbow at one of the tall tables. He couldn’t afford to become distracted by the beautiful and ever so revealing gowns of the aristocratic ladies in attendance, so he amused himself by wondering what Jhin, who always wore his white mask, would look like at a masquerade ball. Would he wear a different, themed mask? Would he take his mask off instead? Surely he wouldn’t wear the same one while everyone else had to expend effort in selecting their banquet attire?

Before long, Draven spotted the familiar white mask among the sea of guests trickling in from the main hall. He gave the hand signal to Darius before heading over to greet their visitor. Though he was a bit disappointed that Jhin hadn’t bothered to pick out another mask, Draven grudgingly noticed that the treacherous bastard had style. He’d shown up in an elegant formal black cloak of a bold but simple cut, accentuated by gold trim that matched the detailing on his mask. “I wonder whose face hides behind this most vicious wolf,” Jhin greeted with a deep cordial bow according to ballroom etiquette.

“Yes, I wonder about the face behind your mask myself,” Draven eyed him carefully. “The general would like a moment before you leave on your journey home.”

“An honor to see the Hand’s esteemed brother once more,” Jhin replied. “I wouldn’t dream of disrespecting the general by leaving without speaking with him first.”

“No need to be quite so formal now. A drink?” He gestured at the delicate crystal glasses of sparkling wines lined up on the tall tables nearby.

Jhin politely shook his head.

“Suit yourself.” Draven started leading their guest through the mingling crowds.

Time to get the sucker primed and ready. Tact and manners weren’t Draven’s strong suit, but the fact that he was known for being brash to the point of rudeness worked in his favor here. As they passed in between dancing pairs, Draven smiled and leaned in conspiratorially with all the casualness of someone about to share a raunchy joke with his best mate.

“You should have seen what he did with your Ionian plaything,” he said under his breath. “Don’t tell him I said that, but he likes questioning the beautiful ones most. Poor thing was all cuts and burns.”

“It saddens me that the general has to attend to such harsh duties,” Jhin’s reply sounded a bit too courteous, too stiff, “but I know he won’t be deterred from doing what is necessary.”

“He won’t indeed,” Draven continued, carefully timing his next words to be just out of his brother’s earshot, “but between you and me, he’d probably let you have him back after that, if you ask nicely.”

He’d secretly hoped Jhin might crack more easily and reveal more with his behavior, but seeing him tense would have to be enough to assure Draven that he’d done his part. This way, it appeared as though he was just spiteful over their last interaction, just acting up without his brother’s knowledge. He’d have to let Darius do the rest.

“I hope my brother’s babble wasn’t overly offensive this evening.” Darius smiled gallantly and offered a poised nod in response to Jhin’s bow. “Enjoying the dance so far?”

“The reception is exquisite, and the Glorious Executioner certainly makes for most exceptional company!”

With a curt nod, Draven excused himself and stepped away in search of a spot from which to observe what happened next. Though a lot of the conversation was lost in the sea of chatter, he watched and listened eagerly. Just before boredom started setting in, he saw Darius bring out the necklace that they’d put in an ornate wooden box atop a crimson velvet pillow. He held the box open and offered it up to Jhin as a gift.

Blah blah, ‘Noxian custom’ (they’d made that part up), blah blah, ‘a most generous host’… He strained to hear their words and couldn’t make out Jhin’s reaction from that far out.

And then he saw it.

The gleam in Darius’s eyes when he sought his gaze. Draven knew instantly that he’d been right, that his brother had sniffed out something in his companion’s behavior that betrayed suspicion, and, like a bloodhound, wasn’t letting go until he found it.

All yours, brother, he smiled and nodded back.

Chapter Text

Jhin tried to calm his restless mind as a now-unmasked Darius led him away from the oppressively high columns and canopies of the ballroom and through winding dark corridors. He’d said something cryptic about wanting his advice on something that required an artistic eye. Jhin struggled to respond politely and inconspicuously to the general’s conversation, and feared that surely he must have grown distrustful by now.

First it had been Draven’s derisive jabs. The arrogant tone, the callous insinuations. His own unconsenting mind’s recursion of the images that tortured his nightmares - only now he knew with certainty that they had really happened. Searing burns branding Sett’s skin. Cruel cuts he had no chance to retaliate to. The agonizing reverberations of that voice that should be echoing for Jhin alone. The fact that this feeling had to be exactly the intent behind his words.

He’d been tempted to dismiss that petty humiliation as nothing more than the ramblings of one irked that his brother didn’t share his suspicions, but then Darius had stunned him by giving him Sett’s necklace. Not a similar necklace, not another necklace of the same make, but the exact one he’d worn when they’d taken him. The only piece he hadn’t removed, back when…. Back then he’d gotten a close look at it, and this was unmistakably the same one. Darius said nothing of it, acting like it was just any old gift. An old custom, he’d said. Jhin had been reluctant to even touch the thing, as if it had been cursed, though he was secretly glad to have it.

Descending into the underground levels, they entered a high security area, passing through hallways of nothing but rows and rows of heavy iron doors. Darius brought him to a space hidden behind two separate layers of doorways and, as far as Jhin could tell, surrounded by all sorts of trap doors and one-way mirrors. Ionian authorities used similar spaces for intel and interrogation, only they usually had sliding screen doors with hidden peeping holes, rather than mirrors.

As Darius slid in the key to the innermost chamber, Jhin caught a glimpse of a bound, cloaked figure inside through a one-way mirror embedded in the wall. Upon entering, he saw the long chains extending out from the figure’s arms towards either wall. Despite the hooded cloak, Jhin feared he knew all too well who it was.

“You should know I so admire your avant-garde approach to art,” Darius’s words were probing, testing, as he paced around his bound prize. “Your canvases are usually for sale to the highest bidder, and I’m more than happy to pay up, but for some reason you were quite reluctant to part with this one.”

Darius worked the hooded cloak off of Sett, ripping each sleeve up along his arms until the fabric fell away. In that moment, Jhin was grateful for the mask concealing his own face. His jaw tightened as his eyes lingered over all the new scars and bruises. The room was all too quiet, Jhin nearly choked on the rage in Sett’s eyes and the barely-healed cut across his face.

Jhin thought he knew powerless rage already. When he first had to surrender Sett to Darius, it felt impossible for his despair to hurt anymore than it did. When Draven spat his mocking words, surely that had to have been the limit. Jhin watched Darius’s hands wander the body of his gagged prisoner with about as much respect as those of someone examining cattle for the slaughter. Clearly, he had been wrong.

“Not like you to get so… attached.” Darius searched intently for any reaction out of Jhin, simultaneously wrapping what looked like a length of barbed wire around his gloved hand.

His fist clenched and hovered all too close. Jhin’s breath caught.

Impact. The barbed knuckles struck the side of Sett’s chest. He didn’t flinch, but Jhin winced reflexively.

It seemed that the wince was not lost on Darius - a smile barely touched his lips as he added, “The question is, why?...

“Tell me his role in your dealings…” the smile was gone, “the truth this time.”

A command. He did not wait before backing up his unspoken threat. The barbed spikes dug deep and cut deeper as Darius took his time drawing his knuckles down after striking. The groan he elicited was somewhat muffled by the gag. The scarlet rivulets of Sett’s blood were so bright they seemed to taint all that Jhin saw in red.

“His role is exactly none,” Jhin enunciated dryly. “I’ve never had business dealings with him.”

In response to what was, ironically, the truth, Darius began unwinding the barbed wire. Without breaking eye contact with Jhin, he walked directly behind Sett, chin over his shoulder, stretching the wire tight against his ribcage.

“Try that again.”

“I have never done business with him,” Jhin barely kept the hatred out of his voice. It was all he could do to reiterate his earlier statement, knowing it would not satisfy Darius.

Darius forcefully dragged the wire across, shredding the skin into ribbons with a nauseating sound. Sett screamed into the rope gag, arms pulling helplessly against their restraints, head recoiling backwards onto Darius’s shoulder. Darius smirked.

Watching was its own type of agony so overwhelming that it left no space for word or thought, plunging Jhin into a chasm of blind fury he didn’t know his way out of. The only thing keeping him from ripping into Darius with his teeth like some rabid beast was that doing so would doom him and Sett both.

“You’d be surprised how much you can recall if you rack your brain a little harder,” Darius’s voice was as cold as his eyes. He hadn’t removed the barbed wire yet, and pointedly looped the long end tight around his knuckles again to get better grip.

Darius had him in a double bind; while it was true that he never worked with Sett, Jhin couldn’t exactly give a good reason for not wanting him harmed. As far as Noxus was concerned, if Jhin was telling the truth and really wasn’t an associate of Sett’s, he wouldn’t care what happened to him one way or another. If it became evident enough that he did care, they would see him as suspicious no matter what. The truth by itself could not help him. He needed to convincingly act unconcerned - all the safer if Sett bought it, too - and he was already failing.

“I’m finding it hard to recall something that never happened, general.”

“I thought you might say that,” Darius sighed. Instead of moving the barbed wire elsewhere, he just pulled it hard - back over the same lacerated flesh, but slower, rending skin and muscle and extracting an even more gut-wrenching scream.

The knuckles on Jhin’s left fist were white from clenching. His whole body was so taut he thought his bones might snap from the tension if he looked at Sett for a second longer. He had to put an end to it, he had to leave, or his head would explode when he heard Sett’s voice again.

“Is that all, general?” Jhin could barely hear his own voice over his shrieking thoughts and the pounding of his own heart. “If I may be excused, I have a long journey ahead.”

Darius raised an eyebrow.

“What’s the rush?” His feigned congeniality was sickening. He yanked the barbed wire off, making Sett shudder visibly.

Darius gripped Sett’s hair roughly, exposing his face and neck for Jhin to see despite Sett trying to shake him off. The curses he tried to spit at Darius were swallowed up by the gag; Darius paid him no mind and reached to his belt for a short dagger. He sought Jhin’s gaze while tracing the outline of Sett’s jaw with the point of the blade. With the dagger so close to his throat, Sett kept still this time.

“I brought you here for your expert advice,” Darius said dispassionately, pulling the blade slowly down Sett’s neck. He pressed hard enough that Jhin could see Sett’s pulse thumping against the blade’s edge, but the skin remained unbroken.

This had better be a bluff or I will kill you, Darius. I don’t care if I die for that.

“How you treat your prisoners is your prerogative, general,” Jhin stopped most of the disdain from seeping through as he spoke, “though I usually prefer allowing them to talk when I’m interrogating them.”

“But I’m not,” Darius said softly. “Interrogating him.”

“Then why…?”

“I’m torturing him.” He locked eyes with Jhin again. “Tell me, what should I do?”

“You give yourself too little credit. It seems you are doing just fine on your own.”

“Hmm.” Darius pulled back his dagger and toyed with the wire some more - letting it hover just above Sett’s skin, bloody spikes dripping - as if he were genuinely unsure. “What would you do?”

What mind game was he playing now? Exploiting his knowledge of Jhin’s sadistic inclinations?

“Would you break the monotony and rip out a few fingernails? An arm?” Darius’s fingers brushed along Sett’s arm but, to his credit, Sett gave no reaction whatsoever. “An eye? Should I carve open his chest and take a look inside?”

Take your damn hands off.

Jhin was at a loss as to Darius’s true intentions and so kept his mouth shut for what became an unsettlingly long stretch of silence.

“Or perhaps I shouldn’t be so hasty in damaging him. After all, you kept him quite intact yourself. Tell me, Jhin, what did you find so entertaining about him?” Darius sounded almost amused.

Jhin’s stomach dropped as he remembered the lie he’d told about why he’d captured Sett. Entertainment, he’d said. He’d known that Darius wouldn’t be easy to deceive, and now he feared the consequences.

“Was it merely the pain? Should I salt his wounds? Have him scream for you some more?” He appeared to consider the idea before contenting himself with the stifled whimper he forced by hovering his fingers on the bleeding edge. “That’s fun, I admit, but surely it will get old before long…”

Darius paced back and forth, scratching his chin in overstated introspection, before putting an arm around Jhin’s shoulders and walking him closer to Sett.

“So how can I possibly make my entertainment last?” The words sounded like outright mockery, ill-coated in faux kindliness, and Darius gave Jhin’s shoulders a scornful little squeeze as he positioned him face to face with Sett, mere inches away. “You could just tell me, you know… but you don't share, do you, Jhin?”

Darius grabbed hold of the barbed wire again. This time, he folded several loops of about forearm length and held the long ends together, wrapping them with more wire around the handle of his dagger to secure them. Jhin dreaded what he knew was coming, but Darius just kept pacing slowly around the room. Jhin felt nauseous by the time Darius found himself behind Sett again and the footsteps stopped.

“Don’t look away,” Darius whispered, snapping the wire loops taut between his hands. 

Being face to face was infinitely more harrowing. Jhin could not see how badly the heavy wire scourged Sett’s back, though he saw droplets of blood flying through the air. This close up, Sett’s eyes blazed like frenzied embers, still seemingly so full of hatred for Jhin. He wasn’t glowing gold, though - he was collared in petricite, which must be suppressing his power, leaving him at Darius’s mercy entirely. He bit down on the rope gag, as if refusing to show to show Jhin any more vulnerability, but Jhin could still read each hit by his face.

Danger overflowed around him, but Jhin found himself lost for words as all the sensations seeped into him, pinpricks tingling up his limbs and spine. The sound of Sett breathing through the strikes. His eyes. His skin, close enough that he could feel its warmth, yet unreachable. The unbearable wrongness of Darius - touching, hurting, leering.

Darius seemingly enjoyed varying his strikes, wielding the makeshift instrument deftly with the ease and certainty of experience. With no way out, Jhin drank it all in, counting and measuring his cruelty. It was too much to count. He imagined repeating all of it, making Darius suffer just as much. It didn’t really help, but it kept his mind occupied enough that he could force himself to keep still and silent. To keep his eyes open.

Darius shifted his movement again. He lashed out horizontally, letting the wire tails wrap around Sett’s side and strike his injured chest right before Jhin’s eyes, stripping off slivers of already tattered skin. Sett’s eyes rolled back into their sockets, his jaw went slack around the rope, and he only took slight, painstaking breaths as he shuddered with the intensity. When was the last time Jhin had looked at someone and wanted them to hurt less? Darius stared into him knowingly and he felt his own body shiver uncontrollably.

Time slowed as Darius geared up for another lateral strike. Jhin did not remember deciding to move, but as the wire tails hissed through the air, he found his prosthetic hand grasping the metal spikes, preventing them from connecting.

Jhin heard Darius laugh. His laughter was a cruel thing, hoarse and sardonic. Jhin was almost relieved to incur his ire upon himself, for it meant that he would stop at last. Darius dropped the makeshift flail and all but tackled Jhin, shoving him into the back wall.

“So that’s what it took,” Darius spoke quietly, pinning Jhin’s arms at his sides. “I gotta say, you aren’t quite living up to the stories.” Shaken and unarmed, Jhin just breathed heavily and stared back.

“Just hearing about the things you’ve done to people before is enough to keep most men up at night…” Darius shook his head and grinned a savage grin as he leaned closer to Jhin’s ear. “I was prepared to go all the way, you know. We’d have been here for hours. My men would be picking up his pieces for months to clean this place.”

Jhin was shaking badly. He didn’t think he could make his body move if he tried. He could no longer even begin to look for words, to seek a way out of this mess, to try to hide the wildness of his expression - Darius seemed to have seen enough, despite Jhin’s mask, and looked delighted.

“Now, my brother fears that you might betray me.” The threat in his gaze was unambiguous. “But I know now that you won’t. You can’t.” He tilted his head towards Sett, and Jhin despised him more than ever.

“You will go back to Navori as planned. You will perform your play, along with all the behind-the-scenes acts, as we agreed.” Darius’s voice was low and serene, as if he wasn’t issuing orders with life-altering stakes. “Or you’ll find that I, too, can be quite the artist with a blade.”

Without another word, Darius turned and gestured to his guards who had been waiting out in the hallway. “I’m done with him. Detain him and make sure that he watches the rest of my work in this room tonight. Then return his weapons and escort him to his ship.” His commands were given in a hushed tone, as if they were meant exclusively for the guards’ ears - and Jhin’s.

***

Sett couldn’t see the masked man any longer. He felt his mind slipping, but through the blur of pain he clearly remembered his prosthetic hand grabbing hold of the barbed wire whip before it struck again - though he didn’t know why. Afterwards, Darius had taken the man aside; the two exchanged unintelligible words, and then the man was gone.

Darius returned, though.

As Darius walked back towards him, everything within Sett’s vision except for the Noxian’s hulking silhouette began to fade into pitch darkness. His footsteps echoed and Sett started hearing other, surreal sounds, quiet at first, joining in the rhythm of the footsteps. Rustling wind, crackling branches… Sett could have sworn he heard the soft notes of a violin coming from somewhere.

The Noxian’s approach was slow and sickening as always, and Sett felt his body shiver on its own as he drew near. Each new reaction forced out of him against his will felt like another betrayal. The dread within him was now almost physical, almost worse than the pain.

Darius looked at him coldly, like all this was mere necessity and brought him no satisfaction. As if. Sett had seen his bloodlust before, seen the fire, but it was the calm that chilled him.

“You did good, mutt.” Darius smirked. “But I’m not done with you yet.” He undid Sett’s gag, but asked no questions.

Darius did not use magic, Sett was sure of it by the look of him, yet there was no other way to explain why, when he hoisted Sett up by his restraints, gnarled branches wrapped around his shackled limbs. He was carried along and bound up against a tree whose trunk was so vast it felt like a flat wall; acid surged up his spasming throat when the rough bark met his raw back.

“Aren’t you gonna ask questions this time?” Speaking only worsened the nausea. The floor suddenly looked dark and quite changed as shadows danced around the edges of his vision.

“Not in words.” Cruel flames briefly flickered in Darius’s gaze before he lowered his eyes to examine one of Sett’s wrists. Starting at the shackle that locked up his outstretched arm parallel to the ground, Darius ran a finger along Sett’s forearm and held it there.

With his free hand, he produced a long, thin throwing dagger from his breast pocket and, without looking at Sett, jabbed it into the chosen spot on his inner forearm. He drove it in deliberately, like a skewer, in between bone and sinew, until the point stuck deep into the bark beneath.

Wild colors swirled inside Sett’s skull as blinding pain hit him. It took all his resolve to stop himself from shaking as any movement forced the blade’s edges to carve deeper. He managed a quick glance at the dagger and saw that it had hardly drawn any blood, carefully as it had been placed to avoid nearby veins.

Darius’s finger moved up closer to Sett’s elbow as he studied him in detached contemplation. The touch made Sett’s skin crawl - Darius had a way of drawing out his fear without questions or threats. Following the promise of his touch, another long dagger plunged into him, wedging itself between his forearm bones and into the bark underneath. The colors inside Sett’s head grew dizzyingly violent again as he recoiled from the sight of his impaled arm.

“Tsk-tsk, it won’t do to just drift away now,” a theatrical voice whispered into Sett’s ear - not Darius’s, yet painfully familiar. “You half-breeds are supposed to be much tougher than humans, aren’t you?”

He wasn’t there. He couldn’t have been. Sett had seen him leave, escorted by guards.

The voice was as clear as anything, impossible to mistake for anyone else. Sett’s eyes searched frantically but fruitlessly for the source.

Darius looked untroubled, like he hadn’t heard anything. He simply kept at his handiwork, moving to Sett’s hand to jab another dagger, this time into his palm between the bones of his fingers, then another one near his shoulder.

“My dear Sett,” the phantasmal voice purred again, “how beautifully your eyes burn!”

Adding insult to injury, Darius unshackled his wrist, leaving Sett’s left arm pinned up like the preserved wing of a moth. All the daggers had handguards, which meant it might be possible to free his arm using that leverage by pulling forward until the blades were released from the bark - if he could muster the willpower or madness needed to try. His body’s preservation instincts would likely make it impossible even if he could bear the pain, but Darius made a point of mocking him by leaving the possibility open regardless.

Trapped and helpless, Sett watched Darius move over to his right arm next, readying another dagger. He was nothing if not meticulous. Insides in knots, Sett looked away to his left, seeking any diversion from the unbearable wait.

Just there in Sett’s line of sight a tenebrous figure in an ornate ivory mask rested its back on the bark next to him - except he couldn't possibly be there.

Sett refused to look back over at Darius even as the next dagger through his right forearm all but had him howling.

“Shhhh….” A mechanical finger rested gently against the mouth of the dark figure’s mask. “Hush, he can hear you. He doesn’t deserve your voice, my precious muse.”

His masked face leaned in to look more closely at Sett’s throbbing, mutilated left arm, then blew cool air and a fistful of golden dust from the palm of his hand into the dripping wounds.

Before Sett’s eyes, the daggers sprung to life - from the holes in his arm sprouted thorny vines that extended and coiled around him, growing leaves, then buds, then vibrant blossoms. Sett nearly sobbed as they wormed through his flesh.

The figure regarded the vines and blooming flowers curiously. The delicate petals started as a deep red where they touched the stems and then shifted into the fiery oranges and yellows one might see in a crucible.

“Noxian blood roses,” he remarked, plucking the blossom growing right out of Sett’s palm. “So vivid, gorging themselves on you like that.”

The spectre of his betrayer was still a more welcome sight than anything Sett had laid eyes on for days, so he kept holding on to it, kept looking. Darius kept plunging dagger after agonizing dagger into his pin cushion of a body, but Sett watched transfixed as the masked figure unhurriedly brought the blossom to his lips and sucked on the stem like a cigar. The tips of the petals ignited like kindling, and, as the figure inhaled, the blaze spread deep into the flower until there was nothing left behind but dark crimson ashes, and the blood red smoke he blew into Sett’s face.

“Why, compared to this, remembering my name can’t hurt that much, can it?” The voice perfectly balanced sneer and tenderness in a way that always touched Sett deeply, so much so that it frightened him.

“You remember it, don’t you?” The figure took the glove off his left hand, touching Sett’s cheek with searing fingertips - it hurt worse than anything else and he wanted to weep, but it only lasted a moment. Ghostly fingers gently collected translucent droplets from the side of his face and brought them to the figure’s tongue beneath the mask. To Sett, it didn’t feel like he had been crying, but his eyes must have watered as he’d tried to hold on.

“Jhin.” It was little more than a whisper. The sounds came unbidden, but the name tasted right on Sett's lips as he allowed himself to think it again at last.

“Still just Darius, I’m afraid,” his jailor gloated.

By now, Sett was pinned up against the tree trunk so thoroughly with the daggers that he had no choice but to stand there like a mounted specimen for Darius to observe even as all his restraints were removed.

The masked figure still faced him, but started retreating, and Sett panicked. He knew it wasn’t really Jhin, but he wasn’t ready to part with it yet either.

“Jhin…” he mouthed again, like a spell or a prayer, “why…”

There were so many why’s. Why did you seek me? Why didn’t you kill me?

He’d already asked once, and Jhin had answered.

Why did you betray me, sell me out to Noxus? Why did you let him have me?

That betrayal stung too deep to forgive, yet there was more. He remembered Jhin’s hand blocking the barbed wire again.

Why, despite all that… Why did you risk trying to protect me earlier?

He remembered Jhin’s eyes while he watched. Remembered how Jhin’s slender body had trembled each time Sett took one of Darius’s strikes. He even remembered Jhin’s urgent whisper for him to try to run before they’d been forced to part, and so much more…

It was only when he heard Darius laugh that Sett realized he’d been gasping for breath.

“You wanted to fight me, right?” Darius taunted, and Sett looked back at him defiantly. “Come on then, take a bite. You’re free of your bindings.” Sett felt faint. One instant Darius’s words and face blurred before him, and in the next Jhin’s mask stood where Darius had just been.

He no longer saw anything but the mask, which floated in the darkness a couple of paces away, and only heard Jhin’s illusive voice beckoning him, “You’re free of your bindings. Come to me.”

Sett gritted his teeth and single-mindedly sought his way towards the voice and the soft music that accompanied it. He knew what he had to do. Move into the daggers that nailed him down, then pull hard until they come free from the tree trunk. Once free, he could pull them out one by one.

First step, press forward until the hilts could brace against him to let him gain purchase. It would mean deliberately moving into the blades until they sink in all the way, relaxing his muscles into the pain. Years of fighting had taught him incredible control even when it hurt, so if anyone could do this, he could. He shook and bled as he tried with his right arm first, fingers twitching, but he did not stop until he felt all four of the handguards digging in. His torn up skin, his bones, the very blood in his veins - everything in his right arm burned excruciatingly loudly, so he forced his focus on the left one, driving it forward into the dagger hilts as well.

“Come to me,” Jhin’s whisper implored. The violin melody was the same one Jhin had played for him when he’d held him captive.

The pain in his mangled arms would eventually snap his resolve if he waited too much longer, so Sett moved right away, gripping the handles of the daggers stuck in his palms with shuddering tendons as he thrust himself unrelentingly forward. The push was not enough to free him, and the effort left him heaving with nausea as the ruinous blades bit harder.

“You can free yourself. Come,” the voice urged him pitilessly from the darkness.

Another try. He could manage another try. His body did not want to move and every fiber of him shrieked as he tried, but he found the nerve to dive forward regardless.

The outlines of the mask blurred as his eyes watered. He leaned desperately into the handguards with crazed force, but it still wasn’t enough to dislodge any of them.

I can’t. I can’t use my power, and my body doesn’t have the strength.

“Is that what you think?” The mask kept retreating into the darkness, but Sett heard the sound of one of Jhin’s shots, which seemed to be going for his collar. It felt hot as a brand on his neck, but Jhin had aimed so precisely that the contraption broke without hurting him, and it took his breath away.

“Do you really want to die that badly?” Sett heard Darius’s voice mutter as unseen hands grabbed hold of his shoulders.

He kept pushing back until his vision went fully black.

***

“Our assumptions were correct. It doesn’t look like it’s possible to overcome the petricite’s silencing effects, even under extreme stress,” Darius explained as his brother helped him remove the daggers from the body of his unconscious captive to get him down from the wall.

“You seem impressed.”

“I rarely meet someone mad enough to attempt what he did. But I’m convinced he started seeing phantasms part way through. Seemed like he couldn’t hear me at all, and he kept saying Jhin’s name.”

“Oh, what’s that?” Draven simpered insufferably.

“Fine, you were right,” Darius conceded sourly. “I just can’t believe it. For someone like Jhin - the demon who left dozens of mutilated corpses in his wake - to be unable to stomach the sight of a bit of light torture… He must be down bad, but at least it’ll be to our benefit.”

“Hmmph. You’re welcome.”