PROLOGUE - SONGLESS REQUIEM
The upper echelons of Demacia had for the longest time their aristocracy mired, to have shared their troubled existence with the nether walks of life, clad in their sheer peasantry of clamorous tavern-goers, cutpurses and the likes of the rowdy common life unbecoming of patricians. Owing to this, all of its national loyalty was but worn away, sundered into fractures dividing the rich and poor in their civil attrition - with the partakers of this strife more than aplenty could count for, and the oppressed more than unwilling to be bound by subservience to power.
One such of them, of the highborns, was House Buvelle, whose penchant for stringing forced evacuations of the lower-born had but tainted their name a blackest hue among the people they tried so hard to get rid of. Draconian laws followed by even harsher executions, their tyrannical imposition upon the weak and poor was but their history thereafter. They were ardent believers in the unadorned, that the world could be run by benign statutes, but their lack of exposition entrenched nebulous beliefs that the lawless and unruly poverty-stricken were a waste of humanity's kindness. The Buvelles would have none of their wallowing in self-pity or of their circumstance - they thought the poor to be pests in the grand scheme of things.
In the privation of the city's lower periphery lay a waste of derelict withered away by apathy and negligence, of community money siphoned into furthering the nobility. The earthen floor was held aloft by muddy squares and beamed with makeshift planking; rivers either ran dry or muddy. Tall grass wild and thrashing further impeded their march, but the Buvelle's army trudged relentlessly on every command.
It was unnaturally dark that night: stains of shadows knotted all of Demacia's lower quarters into silhouettes, and the murk of loose soil was sheathed under eventide - the uneven footing of the ground was altogether held by its own strange gravity which made merely treading over them a task. They stood before a house rotting in its desolation; its putrid of stench gave away the presence of witchcraft in the house. The carcasses left to rot inside were more conspicuous to the nose than the eye, and churned even the stomachs of some hard-heaving soldiers. The First Lord of Buvelle, brave front of its military, watched as the ceilings crumpled in waves of magic, as the floor uncoiled every strip of boarding in aversion to an intruder's passage - still alive were the very remnants of powerful magic long absconded.
Amidst the foul and vile nestled an old lady, unspeaking and deathly stilled in her resting chair. The bloodstained blindfold above her nose suggested mortal blindness, but it was no more than a strange thought, for all of Demacia knew of this cursed house in the forest and its ancestors whom offered their bodies to entities unknown in exchange for destructive powers they themselves knew too well they could not afford. A deathly silence stifled all in its loom, heightening the suffocating heat the room was choking in. The pace of time was kept by the Lord's mindless tapping of fingers on the side of his thighs, a mindless gesture long endured into a habit. In a blinding flight of scintillation, as the Lord took exactly a lone step towards the witch, black tar beneath her willed itself alive into the form of a faceless beast. Even if it lacked appendage, its preternaturally tremendous mouth fitted with a splintering maze of monstrous teeth shook even the Lord. With a shriek, rasp and hoarse, it bared its mouth, exposing the hollow void that was the inside of its belly, and the one soldier unfortunate enough to have peered into the emptiness was torn into motes of madness, streaked into insanity in an instant. The darkness had crept into him. He dropped screaming, writhing, as an inexorable sense of dread overcame his being. On his skin the feeling was tangible: serrate, cold, and dry. The poor man soon became near paralyzed, left to fend for his life with breathless gasps. At that moment, his cognition was twisted upon him, and he soon was struggling to understand even his very own existence through his bloodied eyes. As the rest turned to his aid, afraid to look at the monster, it devoured the witch in one fell swoop, then slumped back to the ground, returning to its dead state of dried tar, denying the Lord the prisoner he had came for.
He looked to his warrior. Dead.
"Witchly scorn." The Lord lamented. He had meant to act on the reported sightings of this witch in the forest several days prior, but pressing urgencies dissuaded him otherwise. Only to cave to his inner self, of a nagging insistence that the people's concerns were as well a stately affair - only to be roused by disappointment he had staved off national attention for an escaped target.
Just as he turned to exit the room, business finished and uncalled, he caught with the corner of his eye a wheezing entity huddled by quiescence in the far edge of the room locked in ugly sobs; frozen by the wayward workings of serendipity in his tracks, washed of his senses by the ravishing beauty of a maiden no more than twenty winters old. She was nestled alongside a golden zither in an unusual state of clean sharply contrasted against the filth of the house. Her hands were kept to herself, tucked beneath her tattered dress for warmth, but the zither was playing, harping a bizarre melody. A tune that could only be described as anachronistic. The reverberating strings, as her hands moved them gracefully, materialized projections of sound waves that echoed softly into the night.
"An instrument of the dead man's gold, no less." The Lord spoke as he inched closer to the girl, stripped of the usual menace he wore. "What have you offered for this?"
She remained gravely silent in her somber and solemn, her fair of porcelain mien marred and obscured by grieving tears and on where they had dried clumsily secured her blue tresses in messy strands. As he took another step forward, she shied away in fear, and her crying loudened. It was for the first time the Lord felt a sting in his heart. He had almost forgotten what it was like to feel sympathy, to be human again, and this very reminder shook his being with a foreign epiphany - one that of mercy.
"Forged the devil's pact with voice for beauty." Reckoned an expressionless soldier. "Wary the temptress' vile magics, sire."
"What will she do, then, my good man?" The Lord answered. He took then a few quick paces next to the girl, and knelt on one knee beside her. "You, can you play the instrument?"
Her face, still turned away from the men in fear, slowly receded back into exposure, revealing a face still tensed with fright, brows rumpled and cracked lips pursed. The zither she clasped onto with her body began drifting into the air, and with material magic, her hands were guided to play its strings. The two of them toggled between pained stares and curious glances. Waves of music manifested in long swaths of silken fibre, enveloping the soldiers and the Lord with a loft of ethereality, isolating them in a realm of trance. They each delivered a renewed knowing of the world with their unearthly melodies - igniting fervent spirits with separate, dissonant chords in flares of cerulean, then reclining their weary minds with a lambent glow of viridescent, and ending on a peak with an ebullience of purple energy. The lot of them reawoken with fervor even in the sombre of grey outside. Gashes closed, vigor rendered weapons weightless, and their moods became an unusual jauntiness.
Theurgy weaved omni-directionally in the magic she played, and it was benevolent, which bore as well strangeness in a house of witches.
There, the most beautiful serenade had been unleashed, the best the Lord had ever heard. It was a loft of resonation that unclouded all worries from all in the room, a melody that was something more: of worldly madness strewn with all the melancholy and exhilaration mankind was afforded to know.
"That is fair in question." The same soldier responded. "But what should we do to her?"
"We take her as one of Buvelle." The Lord murmured, eyes affixed on her, a smile tearing across an otherwise stern expression. "Madame would love her to bits."