You met him for the first time just inside Piltover's walls, clutching a muddy piece of paper as if it was made of gold.

He was blonde; short; scrawny, in a way, covered in soot and bruises and that god-awful smell of rebellion, so you hauled him back to your house, locked him inside despite his protests, determined to lecture him on the dangers of wandering outside. He looked up at you with innocent sky blue eyes, begged you to understand, so you sighed at him – laughed at him, almost – before relenting, brewing him coffee so the kid could spit out his story.

Ezreal's lips trembled, but then he cleared his throat and you felt the dust particles shimmering under the sunlight settle, all the laser cutters and power tools in your room growing quiet just for him. There was a world before the universe became waves and waves of machines without end; there were wind turbines tall as the sky, palaces built from marble that shimmered like crystal, proud warriors and believers of the sun and the moon that could eclipse the day to night. As he spoke you subconsciously reached for your clarinet, giving him a tune to match the melody in his words; he rose and fell with your notes, a bard without a fiddle, his tales more stunning in themselves than the glorious odes of passion he often spoke of. We haven't always been like this, he promised, something glinting in those irises that spoke of forever and prayers that did not fall to silence. We used to stand under the sun proud as angels, sing of the double harvests in the far South in Demacia, dance with the Ionians in the woods to seek nirvana. Life isn't – shouldn't – be about Fourier transforms and making prototypes only to watch them fail over and over; life is not just the coldness of the walls, the long rationing lines, the belief that we're here to hold on because we has to. Life is so much more than that. Humanity is so much more than that. I know too many of us think the world is too dark to even dream in color, but I've seen flowers bloom at midnight; sometimes it takes the most wounded wings, the most broken things, to remind us how strong the breeze is, how precious the flight.

You said only one word, a single longing thought: "Wow."

He knew the effect he had on people; with a satisfied look he started for the door, still clutching that Noxian artifact in his hands, every inch a gifted prophet. "Are you still going to tell me to stay?"

You switched everything in your room back on. Thundering noises. He twitched and scowled. There was a feeling at the back of your throat that you couldn't quite put words to. "I would hate to see you die."

"To die would be to lose the ability to travel. To lose my humanity."

"Humans are fragile. Feel free to come visit me if you need anything." You were young – him even younger – but a kind of understanding passed through the air and he nodded before walking out the door, picking up a pair of goggles from your worktable as he did so. You frowned. The knight on your chessboard took its first step. The wheels of fate had started rolling.

You met him for the second time just outside Piltover's walls, staring at an entire field of ruins that yet sent smoke up into the air.

"A pity, isn't it?" You asked, careful, hiding both the clarinet and the pen behind you as you walked up to him, trying your damn hardest not to remember how all your attempts at poetry and understanding life had all come down to a background radiation-like grey fuzz. Only Ezreal could understand it all, a living and breathing lighthouse of hope and optimism that never went out, all the sweet and unforgettable details of tomorrow immersed in his blood; you wondered if you were intoxicated with him, addicted to the lovely trivia things he could simply roll out, and decided it was something better than coffee to be dependent on, forcing out an uneasy smile. "Whatever they had here was beautiful."

"Jayce," he ignored your question, only throwing back one of his own, picking at a charred tile, "What if one of these days I just can't explore anymore?"

You froze. Panic bubbled at the back of your throat, a tune abruptly cut off in the middle of the capriccio. "What makes you say that?"

"Look at this mess. Soon I won't be able to leave the city anymore. If I insist on trying, the mechas and battlecasts could probably destroy my legs in one instant." A cynical laugh. "I hope that day will never come."

But I live by your wonder. Your inner voice, those fragments of light, the little phrases and images that have touched me in ways I never thought possible – they gave my life purpose and an iridescent shine. "It will be okay. Trust me. They call me the Defender of Tomorrow – what would I be if you can't tell me anything about tomorrow anymore? Even if, gods forbid, something happens to you, I'll heal you."

He snorted. "You're not a healer."

You weren't going to let him go. "You told me to believe in miracles."

It was just so silent.

No inspiration ever came to you, so: listen. Listened harder. Took walks out at god forsaken o'clock, crouched down next to withering flowers, ran your large calloused fingers over cold stone surfaces. Did the thing Ezreal told you where you imagined how the spot you were standing on looked like five centuries ago, shiny headlights and carefree couples, asphalt roads almost too gorgeous to be overrun.

You swore the boy could have composed from empty air, so – what is so different? What creative talents does he possess that I simply do not?

The clock tolled three. You still hadn't managed to create a fully functional prototype. You idly wondered if you would be okay with drowning if it meant you could write yourself a beautiful requiem.

Doing science, being a defender, acting as a guardian – Ezreal had told you about the knights of old, their famed chivalrous acts, how they were loved and admired wherever they went. You are a knight. The best kind. You had always been proud of your fierce loyalty and courage, your wish to protect everyone within the city walls – but how much of it was because you really cared about the city, and how much of it was selfish instead, just hoping that your acts would get people to notice you, love you, acknowledge that you yet lived on this world?

I like his stories because they make me feel noble, he thought hollowly. I want his world instead of mine, because while mine's all rugged fighting and dirty science and just wanting to be useful, his is beyond simply beautiful.

Even dying in his world would probably be better than living in mine…

Was it love, pure and simple?

You wanted to escape, to become something more than what you were, to transform into something beautiful enough to be loved and cherished on its own. Let me only feel the butterflies in my stomach when you speak of love. Let me become you, be similar to you, love you. Let me out of this city full of doubts of failure and mathematical equations that can't convince me that I'm any more human than the machines that continuously rams on our doors. Let me understand, defend, pretend.

You closed your eyes. The clock tolled again. All around you, there was only wind.

I didn't know it was possible to overdose on wistfulness.

She was a meteor that shot through your sky with a trail of violet, illuminating everything in your path; she fought as if she was dancing, smooth caliber nets into traps into graceful Piltovers, and you almost forgot that you were trapped behind two dozen augments with explicit orders to destroy your brain, feeling only the need to watch her, steel blue eyes wide. Ezreal had talked of classical music, but Caitlyn orchestrated an entire symphony with gunfire, ace in the hole blasting through the atmosphere as she shouted Tiro Finale; power and elegance radiated off her skin as if she was born into royalty, a magnificence that demanded starstruck attention, and as she landed in front of you with the glass of tea and that top hat, you knew she was everything you had ever wanted to be.

"My mother was a theoretical physicist," she said, smiling comfortably, handing you a clean handkerchief to wipe away the blood. You nodded. Of course she knew her science as well as her magic.

"Do you want to come by to have a cup of tea?"

"I'm a coffee person," you mumbled in crimson embarrassment, and she laughed out loud, patting you on the shoulder before assuring you that she had a whole collection of mochas, too.

"Why would I not want to be like you, sheriff?"

Because the road is long and hard. Don't make your decision lightly. Our city needs protecting, but I'm doing okay for now. I'd love for you to join me, but it's your own personal decision, your own powers to obtain and hold.

"I've wanted to be a proper guardian my whole life. You know, to be able to hold off an entire battalion instead of just a few robots."

You're doing fine, even just as you are. It's been a while since I've been able to talk to someone about all of this.

"You don't deserve to be alone. If I could indeed use my spark of humanity to become stronger than ever before – and gain a wish in the process – what could possibly go wrong?"

A lot of things, Caitlyn's eyes darkened as your fingers trembled slightly around the coffee cup. Your wish, for example. Don't forget that you're still human.

She was a messiah. You were someone who simply wanted to be a hero. While she lived on the tightrope between life and death, you had to your name only a wish and a tingling sensitivity, a fear that everyone you admired would soon leave you behind. "Isn't that why we're still battling the machines and steadfastly refuse to be converted?"

That's what we say, she replied, blinking, seemingly trying not to figure out the beginning and the end of the war. Although I feel like our species are more alike than I'd ever want us to be.

You reached for her hands impulsively, holding her close to you, hoping your promises could mean something to her. "Sheriff. Caitlyn. You're one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met, so just stay with me, okay? We'll stay together, for this city, our future, and each other."

Her stoic mask faltered ever so slightly. You'd stay with me?

"Of course. Come on now, smile. Our future will be bright."

You buried her in the woods behind her home, a set of teacups and two dozen cupcakes. The dessert was slightly black at the edges and all too salty with your tears, but you hoped that she would understand, convinced yourself that she would still appreciate it, wherever she had gone. I tried, Cait, you whispered, and the tears just fell like rain, no words enough for the grief of an empty night.

Although the question remained: did you, really?

There was no body to bury, for you had watched her die, heard that awful crunch as they shattered the gem on her top hat along with the bones in her neck, a dreadful frequency that shook your world like nothing ever had, not even Ezreal's chronicles of Ionia under the dawn sky. It was the first sound that sent you running, the first sound that made you spew out a hundred words of eulogy and seventeen minutes of clarinet music, but in the end – what had you done?

What use is a knight who could only run away?

"Cait, I'm so, so sorry."

What use is an apology to the dead?

You wondered if it was too late, now, to make the contract, to follow in her footsteps and trade that special gift in your heart for the power to massacre her murderers. Would it be an insult to her memory, to finally step out after her death?

They didn't just kill her. They had feasted on her, torn her apart, ripped away one of the most beautiful figures that had ever graced this city. She never screamed – even if she was alive, she wouldn't have done so – but he thought he heard them all the same, desperate cries for help in his head, echoes that tormented him even as he slashed at the machines with what prototype weapons he had. Maybe the screams were from me, he realized. Maybe it was me that couldn't deal with any of this.

Ezreal's stories couldn't cheer you up that night. You were way too distracted, anyway. Did he ever tell me a story where the lady wasn't saved by the knight?

"Jayce," Ezreal rasped, breaking you out of your trance. "Jayce, they broke my legs."

You turned around to stare. He was trying to crawl out of the door, a small trail of blood by his wake. Something had died in those eyes under the shattered glass of the goggles; instead of the spring sky, they were now the color of midnight. How many minutes is it going to be until we all reach our own moments of midnight? Caitlyn, him, me, the entire fucking city, all the rest of humanity? "Get the fuck back, you idiot!"

"I can't die in this city when there's so much beyond the city walls!"

"They'll shoot you into a fucking bullet hole!"

"I can't live while being crippled like this!"

He reached out and your heart broke the same moment you heard his femur crack and crumble, red blood spilled over white snow, tragic stories that should never be told. The Explorer lay sprawled out and defeated over the street only one block away from Piltover's gates, a thousand muffled sounds of machine gunfire going off just within earshot, and you ran to kneel down next to him, cradling his head, reaching for his heartbeat.

"I'll save us. I promise."

And that was the beginning of the end.

Mercury. The Hammer-Cannon sang in your hands, the most beautiful thing that had ever belonged to you but also the most costly, its sleek figure barely warm in the cold. You shot a shock blast through the acceleration gate before leaping into the fray with lightning field and thundering blow, sweat and blood mixing with smoke and broken mechanical parts.

You weren't anywhere near as good as Caitlyn – she was both more experienced and more gifted, but you figured you could put in more work than her, make up for what was missing in your body with an extra dose of faith in your soul. I'm using my humanity to defend the best humanity had and has to offer. I will make Cait proud, even if she'll never hear me, even if her house has been completely covered in frost.

You had switched from drinking coffee to drinking tea. You were almost glad it tasted as bitter as it always did.

Ezreal had never seen you out and about demolishing those long lines of mechas and battlecasts – what reason did he have to care? – but you had spied him walking up and about, taking slow walks on the streets, looking out wistfully towards the outside of the city. He'll be okay soon, you reassured yourself, and was chagrined when you realized it didn't please you as much as you thought it would. He'll be okay soon, and he'll leave, starting to explore again just like always.

Maybe that was why Vi bothered you, more than anything.

She had dropped out of the sky randomly one day while you were on duty, giving you a thorough and brutal beating simply because you apparently needed to be taught a lesson about how to live. You're not a fucking generator, she had mocked, slamming you against a wall hard enough to break three ribs. Stop using your cannon as if you have access to all the electricity in Piltover.

"Nobody else is going to deal with the robots –"

What did that blue-haired woman tell you? Just look at you. We're in a fucking war. There are reasons why knights of chivalry don't exist anymore.

"What did you call her? What did you fucking call her?"

I suppose Caitlyn tried to convince you that there was some kind of moral to all of this? We only fight the machines because we have to. It's the payment for that ancient magic, the thing that granted us our wishes. Have you ever tried not fighting them anymore?

When you had refused to answer: Why the hell do you have to make your life so miserable?

"Why do you not care about the misery of other people?"

Why do you care?

She haunted you like a ghost; seemed to hang around when you asked Ezreal to tell you a story, flanked you as you fought the augments just outside the gates, laughed at you when you slowly trudged home with a weary body and a wearier soul. Jayce, why don't you see? Why don't you just break Ezreal's legs, tie him up so he'll never leave this city again, giving him no choice but to stay forever with you?

You hated her for the sinister words she whispered by your ear, for the planting of the devil's seed that your darkest desires nourished and let grow; you wanted to be human – be a better human – but how could you be the best human knight, when being human was too much love and too much hurt, and fighting the machines with only muscle memory and metal weapons always felt better instead, an escape from all the longing and regret that you couldn't just let pass?

You understood whoever first created robots several centuries ago, and you hated yourself for it.

I'm not as pure as Caitlyn. While she wished genuinely to help people, I wished to become a hero, to make something for myself, to be useful. Even when I wished for Ezreal's healing, how much of that was because I really cared about him, and how much of that was because I just wanted him to owe something to me?

Vi looked down at you from the rooftop with a kind of glee in her eyes, and you felt sick to your stomach. I'm not like her. I can't be. I'm not.

You could see your dreams floating away into the wind, drowning in all the leftover static of dead and dying robots. Ezreal's stories of devotion and sacrifice were fading in your memory, one character at a time, and although you would desperately flip through all of your notes to try to remember and cling on, everything just kept slipping away.

I've been spending the entire day fighting robots, but I can't let anyone see me, out of the fear that they'll ask after me and make the same mistake – mistake? – that I've made… But then, what's this loneliness? What's this feeling now, when no one seems to miss me on the streets anymore, nobody ever stops by now to say hello? I guess they haven't really seen me for a while, but I've been fighting for all of them, every single last one, all this time…

Vi woke you up at god forsaken o'clock in the fucking morning, said she could take you somewhere you might appreciate. Your limbs felt like they were made of lead. You nodded, secretly hoping that if you humored her one time, she'd let you be for a little while.

She decided to take you to an abandoned church.

You would never have guessed Vi was once the idealistic type; with her gigantic gauntlets and unruly goggles, you would have thought she was more like some of the boys you had grown up with, punk scientists who got drunk and blew entire laboratories to pieces whenever one of their baby experiments failed to come through. Her hair, her attire, the way she punched everything aside without a care in the world – which part of that spoke compassion and faith, exactly?

But Vi believed. Once upon a time, Vi was just like Caitlyn, and only a few years ago, she had worked with Piltover, patrolling the city just like the sheriff did.

"I wanted to be accepted," Vi shrugged, wolfing down an apple. "Loved. Be in the right. Just like you. Just like most humans. We aren't all that different, you know."

"But you left Caitlyn. You gave up on tomorrow."

"I wished to save a bunch of miners from a collapsed tunnel. It sounded like a good idea at the time. I only found out years later that they had already inhaled too much dust, so they all ended up dying slow and painful deaths without any support from the city." You stared at her, absolutely mortified; she laughed drily, tossing up an apple into the air. "Aren't our wishes and powers wonderful?"

"That's not – it still doesn't –"

"If you wish for hope, you will have to suffer from despair. There's no way around it. Why don't you just do whatever the hell you want with your hammer? I do whatever the hell I want with my fists."

Mercury. The reason it shines – the reason why shock blasts shimmer blue in the night, and the lightning fields glow gold like the old fireflies in the long-lost Kumungu – could I ever, ever let those feelings become a lie? Could I ever just tell myself that those stories never kept me up at night smiling like a fucking idiot, that I really am just an idiot who can't even stay true to myself, someone who's never meant to be a knight?

I loved Ezreal's way of turning the smallest things into music, and I could never give up on Caitlyn, not when she took me in, showed me around, and never cried a single tear. I owe it to them. I owe it to Piltover. I owe it to that glimmer of light in me, that humanity that let me get here in the first place.

Even if I have to stack my own tears until they bleed with every blow of the hammer –

Even if I'd die a worse death than Caitlyn, with no one even remembering me –

What would I be, if I couldn't even stand and fight this fate?

"I'm sorry," you heard yourself say, half wistful, half unapologetic. "I really misunderstood you." I would do what she did, too, if I thought I could still hurt anyone, but everyone in my life had left me. Ezreal had been packing, and how could I tell him to stay?

She sat down back-to-back against you, and you almost felt a lingering wish in the air, something she wanted to tell you but couldn't just say. It was probably something along the lines of "you are fucking dumb."

To be fair, you were fucking dumb.

"Jayce."

"I have to keep going as I am. If that interferes with your life, you're welcome to try to come kill me. I won't lose."

"Jayce, you fucking idiot –"

But you love it, don't you? Like I love you, somewhere deep down, amazed at how much you care. But it doesn't matter. I have to be better than you, although I'm also fundamentally so much more fallen than you. Tainted. Weak. Always following someone else's ideals instead of really making up my own. I have to go on, for this is the only way in which I could feel strong. Even if I can't hold my eyes dry, I have to stay true to my soul, even if it will shatter and break.

"I won't resent you or anyone else."

Behind you, a flurry of punches were thrown at the wall.

You were nervous; always just a little bit nervous when you came home after a whole day of fighting, stuffed away the cannon and armor to sit down next to Ezreal and listen to his stories. There would be that little hesitation in your steps, something so different from the warrior during the day who shot and hammered without question, something small, gentle, but loving. But this time you stopped and glanced around frantically: Ezreal was no longer sitting where he always sat, and the time wasn't wrong, either.

"Ezreal? Ezreal?" You called out aimlessly, frantic, wanting to see him. Even if I had resigned myself to the reality of him leaving, I never thought he'd just leave without saying goodbye.

"You came back early?" A blond head poked out of the door, the words just colored that slight bit of impatient. Your pulse picked up, then slowed, your heart rate jumping off a cliff. "I'm going to leave in ten."

"Are you sure you're going to be okay?" I'll personally guard you through the gates if I have to, fight three mechas at once, use the hextech capacitor –

"Of course. I've always been okay."

You hated him. You hated yourself for not saying anything, for not thinking you had a right to his freedom or his affections, for feeling you should be completely alright with your wish even though you had gave up so much for it.

You wanted to run to your room and smash him to pieces with your Mercury hammer –

But, for that thought alone, you really deserved to be shot by Caitlyn's ultimate at least a thousand times.

What a fucking hypocrite, you thought hollowly to yourself. And you say you still believe in light and humanity?

"Have a great trip," you said, and nothing more than that.

Hammer robots. Blast through metal. Your arm is bleeding: heal. Heal because you can. Heal because apparently you get that bonus from making that fucking wish. Heal because goddammit it maybe it was about fucking time the world threw you a bone for all the wounds on your heart that just wouldn't close.

Stumbled through gravity fields. Knocked away thousand-volt things that wanted to annihilate you. Cried at good old mechanical joints that were better than anything you'd ever come up with. You hadn't washed the hammer clean for days, so there were mechanical grease and human blood and all these other things you couldn't even describe imprinted on it, and under the dying sun, the patterns looked like a kaleidoscope.

Drank coffee. Drank tea. Swallowed too many cold medication pills because the migraine was too much. If the caffeine kicked in, you cut through the machine lines like a madman, leaving nothing but destruction in your wake. But if the caffeine wasn't cooperative, well:

Sat there. Sprawled around. Tried to bury yourself in snow, or pretend you weren't just standing there being all catatonic.

If only humans could erase memories at will like the machines.

You were glad you kept your memories when you ran into him again, that familiar signature stinking with Caitlyn's blood, this time also somehow smelling like one of the boys you competed in science against many years ago: maybe the rumors were true, and the machines indeed read the memories of those they captured and converted them into machines, too.

Ten percent of you shuddered to think of Caitlyn behind an emotionless steel mask. The rest of you were consumed by bloodlust.

The sun had set; the world was that eerie mix of white and grey, all the symbols of light and purity and morally ambiguous lies, and the thing that smelled like Caitlyn stood near the top of a small hill, commanding an entire small army between him and you. You stopped for a little while to catch your breath; they turned towards you as you stepped ahead, and then there were a thousand metallic heads, coursing towards you as if a hydra or a dragon, seeking to slice through your neck and reduce you to ashes –

You bit down on your lips until you tasted blood, ran towards the heads with abandon even through the acceleration gate, blasting through every single one with hyper charge until you felt something black run down your arms, sticky and hot, burning with the heat and smoke of the electric field, long turned to rust from gold. Was it your blood? Machine shit? No matter.

More heads shot towards the sky; a jail cell, a cage to hold Ezreal back, something to lock Caitlyn behind the obsidian doors of death, the dust that trapped everyone Vi had wanted to save. You rose to the skies – oh if it was really always this simple to fly – before slamming down, cutting through wires and circuits and melting entire protoboards, jolting electricity through your heart that almost threatened to knock you out.

I'm not going to die, you thought dimly, pushing yourself through with the hextech capacitor, running towards the murderer. Not before I bring you to justice, as Caitlyn had liked to say.

Something in his retinas exploded: a death ray sliced through you right in the heart, a fiery supernova with ripples of aftershocks, and as you fell to your knees, you were drawn into an arcane singularity, a chaos storm that gnawed through your skin at your bones and forced – demanded – that you gave up your hold on the cannon. Healing surged through you, something that insisted just as much as the storm to play your body and soul, and in that trance of remission and relapse you could only think one thing:

I will not yield.

I will not yield.

I will not yield.

The storm grew; became a solid mass, a thousand things with metallic tips running through you, and there were blood on your lips, tears in your throat that choked you more than anything. Smash. Charge. Blast. You were not drowning in an ocean of abandonment; you were salty over yourself, upset at how you had been such a gigantic disappointment. Is this how Caitlyn felt when she died? Is this fate, to die so humiliatingly, to the same entity that once took away something you loved?

Vault breaker. Denting blows. All stacks of excessive force. You landed on something warm and soft.

Your eyes fluttered open.

"Vi," you whispered. "Why?"

"God damn, I couldn't just sit here much longer. Just get back. I'll show you the basics."

No. No. You got down as if to propose to her, but let yourself go instead, shooting out of her arms like a shock blast itself. The machine herald was there, his armor full of Caitlyn, his expression unreadable; you sliced through his head in one stroke, but what must be a hundred death rays only shot out from the wound at once, each trying to strangle you, to tell you how much Caitlyn hated you, to belittle you.

"I can do this myself." For don't I have to?

You reached for yourself; the entirety of your body was ruined, your chest mangled, your arms riddled with bullet holes, your legs about to give out under the strain. But what of it? What of these death rays? How could one feel pain if there was no such thing as pain anymore?

If I'm no longer truly human, can't I exploit that, make it so that I can hurt less?

You punched yourself hard in the heart, right where the wound exposed it; you felt your heart rate falter but keep on, but there was no pain, none at all, and so you threw yourself into the ecstasy of battle lust, changing into hammer form and slamming down upon the herald's form without a care as to what the armor was made of or whether or not he had anything left on his sleeve.

I'm a machine, you thought, and then laughed out loud, an insane sound of laughter echoing through the entirety of the grey world and the noble city of Piltover behind its walls. If they don't shatter the gem on my cannon I'm basically an indestructible machine that can't feel pain, and isn't that absolutely wonderful, to be able to just slam and whack and burn you in my revenge, annihilate you for taking away everything that I've ever wanted, try to take out my anger on you because I'm a human that cannot even now face his own humanity?

Slam. Don't let me be human. Let me be a machine.

Slam. Die. Die. Die.

Slam. I am a guardian. I am a knight.

Slam. Nothing matters anymore. Nothing has ever mattered.

Slam. I can't feel my face.

Slam. For a brighter tomorrow.

"Stop… please stop…"

Cait? Vi? Ez?

If I die here – if I die anywhere –

… I love you all?

You don't know when you quit, if you quit, what time it is, or where you are. It's several hours away from home and you don't know what home is, don't know how to use "home is where the heart is" if your physical heart has been shattered into half a dozen pieces. It's cold. It's lonely. Mercury is too heavy for your fractured bones, but you have to move, move or perish alone.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather trust the machines than human vermin.

The machines actually make sense. The humans only know how to wail and cry.

Have you seen the humans? They sell each other out all the time for the smallest gains. A lot of them don't even remember.

I sold my child to the program because her mother was a fucking whore. I've been living like a fucking king.

Are those your issues? You think mutedly, approaching from the back, a hammer in hand. Are those your fucking issues?

You long to not feel, to only disappear, to become a cautionary tale. But you are a machine with a human soul, so you only break loose without a single sound, smashing Piltovian traitors' bodies like you did the Machine Herald until your hammer is drenched with blood and you can no longer see the stars.

It's over.

There are a thousand voices calling you stupid, you calling yourself stupid, exclamations echoing off the walls of your heart chambers, screaming until your head is about to explode, crying until you're out of tears and there's only rain, rain as the gates of Piltover crash shut in front of you and you bang your hands against the iron bars, screeching to be let in like an animal.

But you're only pretending to be human.

You're a fucking knight that has lost his mind.

You don't resist this time when robotic hands reach for you and pull you away, for what's the difference between man and machine, now?

"I'm stupid. I'm so stupid…"

The balance between hope and despair – it keeps itself at zero…

I understand now, Vi, trust me, I do.

If someone has to be cursed to balance out a wish for someone else's happiness, I'm okay with it being me.

Inside the gates, Vi screams your name on the top of her lungs as you pray for your heart to stop.

They take out your heart and replace it with metal; you will be the new Machine Herald.

uu: "KNIGHT TO D6."

uu: THE KNIGHT IS DEAD.