#ay lads

     He promised her a struggle. He promised her that he would give it his all. If she decided herself a hero, one to rise against the weary and slay what she deemed to be the scourge of all of Ionia, he'd let her whet her blades -- but he would not make it simple, and neither did he make it easy. Two steps more, and it would be her beautiful form splayed out and lifeless, not his.

     When she finally approached him, the darkness was almost all-consuming. A constant, derelict buzz replaced the pounding for what he could hear. She said something to him -- he figured it a jab, or a soliloquy (both ideas amused him, frail as he was) -- but he did not rebut her. Instead, he pushed forth not a cry or a yell, but a laugh.

     He laughed a harrowing laugh, the sort of laugh that gladly ate up whatever sensibilities a dying man could still have. He would have wept tears with that laughter, but by the time it shriveled up and he said his last words, his very last words:

     "Thank you."

     He was already gone.

     A man sits in his foyer, alone. Though there is no clock, he imagines its ticking as he sits, bored as could be. A platter of tea stands in front of him, untouched. The squeal of steam is perhaps the most exciting thing he has heard all evening.

     The Golden Demon was dead. Irelia had known it since he fell back to his side after he thanked her, her blades more aware of his passing than she was. When she stepped over his body, she was cautious, as if she expected him to shed the illusion of death and leap at her. With two feet beside his chest and Jhin continuing to be motionless, only then was she secure.

     Irelia knelt down, staring at his wound. A gash from his right shoulder to the lower left of his waist, ripped clean through his robes. She crinkled her nose. For a creature as esteemed as Jhin was in battle, Irelia could still hardly believe that he never wore armor. She reached above the wound to feel his mask, tracing her figures around the horns of the mouth and the edges of the gold.

     The mask. The visage of one so feared, one so loathed. She could turn his body inside out and stake it up for the rest of Ionia to see, and she would be met only with applause. No. Jhin did not deserve that sort of fanfare. She would pass the news to Karma, who would pass it to Shen, and from Shen to Zed...

     Now she looked grim as she took hold on the mask, fixing it in her grip as she peeled it gently from his face. His cowl followed with less celebration. A demon who took the skin of a man greeted her in return, still warm in the face.

     She coughed, ready to throw up.

     The man pours himself a cup, not enthralled with the taste that he would be met with. A wide, spacious painting sits prestigious on his mantle, its artist uncertain. It is a rolling landscape of the southern mountains, dotted with the windswept cherry blossoms of the spring.

     Jhin was cremated. The vote was hailed by that of the Elders, who deemed his body too threatening to balance to let rot for any longer than necessary. His equipment and dress was seized, his residence discovered not too long after his cremation. The Ionian public honored Irelia as a savior of the people, able to save countless innocents from what was more than a decade of torment under the Demon's reign of terror.

     She, herself, became envious of more obscure days. She had only faint recollections of who got what of the Golden Demon -- although she was allowed her pick of the spoils down to his grostesque paintings, she wanted none of it. He was a beast that all but begged for his slaughter -- to carry mementos of that night was asking for nightmarish recollection.

     The man's leg begins to shake, his irritation with the silence now reaching a head. He stands up from his table and passes it by, now in front of his mantle. Not two feet from the painting, a mask is displayed in gold. He takes it.

     Irelia, later into her life, was asked for accounts concerning the Demon, which she divulged. Wisened from her years, she was no longer uncomfortable with telling how Jhin grew enamored with her and tried to use her as some sort of twisted puppet in his many grotesque performances. Though now known as nothing more than a man, the Golden Demon was written into legend, against her better judgment. In death, he was afforded all of the publicity he would have wanted.

     He feels the mask. Its edges are sharp and angular, in the shape of a horrific yet smiling oni. He lingers like that for what felt like hours until he slowly turned the mask away from him...

     ... and puts it on his face.

     That man curled backwards at an unnatural angle, screaming as his hands clawed at the mask. He twisted and writhed, stumbling through the house and knocking over his priceless tea set. His limbs convulsed, relaxing and tensing seemingly at random while he dragged himself outside and into the moonlight.

     Into the red, glaring moonlight.

     That man, who wore the mask and stared straight at the Blood Moon, hissing and crying while the gold of the mask melted off and caked into a cold, ivory white ...