I promised this months ago. Sorry sorry sorry.

(Please show mercy.)

Edit, for clarification: this was written in tribute to (and as an explanation for) the Reaper Soraka skin. As I've waited forever and a day to post it, I realize that may not have been clear. Thank you to the reviewer who pointed it out to me. (heart)


Epilogue Part II: Don't Fear the Reaper

Under a blanket of endless night, to travel the sea is to slip like a knife between the black ribs of a cold and drowsy void. It is the kind of dark that absorbs all light; the kind of dark that asks for more and more lanterns, only to swallow them whole and screaming.

Once upon a time, there were stars. Once upon a time not too long ago, in fact.

They discuss this amongst themselves, the ship's passengers. Some of them say it happened slowly over a smattering of years before the war; that they winked out, one or two at a time, until there were none left.

The others claim it happened suddenly. One night, they say, somebody looked up to find them gone, and they simply never came back.

A select few others, the captain among them, believe they're still up there somewhere in the sky's thick belly, devoured but not extinguished, waiting. He has discussed this theory at length, for he believes it faithfully. But this is his ship's last voyage, and he can be bothered only to smoke, not to comment.

Eventually, he wanders away. There is nothing to see, but he takes his old familiar place at the rail. When there was such a thing as day, he would watch, from that certain place, the icy pink breath of dawn. When there was such a thing as moonlight, he would watch it ripple in the night-sea's indigo mirror. But there's nothing to see anymore; he is there out of habit and apathy.

And so, attuned only to his thoughts, he doesn't notice her at first; she is still as a statue there by the rail, by the smooth water. Cloaked in the same darkness as the rest of the world, there is nothing to notice.

But she opens her eyes, and when the white flashes on the cusp of his vision, he turns and beholds her, beholds the light, the starlight, that spills from the place where her eyes should be.

He sucks in a breath, audibly; he braces himself to flee her presence. But there is something familiar about her, about the white rope of her hair, about her perfect, terrifying beauty that makes him swallow, hesitate, grind his teeth. At last, lip quivering, he says, "you were here with me before." His cigarette falls from between his fingers unchecked, fades to black on the laughing sea. "It was a long time ago."

Her eyes burn him. "Not so long ago," she says, smiling.

"Before the war," he says. For most, this has become the only true measurement of time.

"Yes. It was before then," she agrees.

Something disconcerting begins to grow in him; something shackled begins to shake free of its chains, and he trembles, hugs himself against a cold wind that seems to come from within and not without. "You're the devil, aren't you?" he asks. "Come to take your due?"

She laughs, and the sound warms him to his bones. "Must I be the devil?" she asks. "To collect a debt?"

He unfolds his arms, presses his hands against his neck, his chest, his abdomen, as though he's searching for himself in the darkness. Suddenly, he says, "I don't want to die."

And smiling only faintly now, Death turns her gaze across the water. "Death is what it costs to live," she says. She turns back to him, and he can hardly see beyond the halo of her eyes. "A single certainty in an otherwise uncertain world. A single equalizer in an otherwise unjust world. The one place," she says, slowly, deliberately, "that we can find hope when all else is lost."

"Hope?" It sputters from him so quickly that he nearly chokes on the word. "In death?"

"Yes. Hope," she says. "Like the artist finds in a blank canvas. Like the heretic finds in a prayer. What you smell on the air when the earth is ripe, on the closing edge of a storm. Death is our purpose, it's what protects us. Death," she says, "is the greatest gift."

And when he begins to fall, he reaches out to her, clutches at her forearms. She lowers him to the deck gently, blinds his eyes with her starlight. "Don't be afraid," she says, and her voice is the only sound. "Walk with me," she says, stroking his head with her warm hands. "I am with you. Walk with me towards the light."


Like spilled ink, Death moves across the plains in the crumbling aftermath of Runeterra's great war. She has set her bones, her arteries, her soul, on a journey through the ruin. A perfect arrow, gilded in a night that never falls, she splits the space that divides her from her other half like a chord of perfect harmony will split a room full of silence.

She arrives in a familiar place, charred and muted and unfamiliar in the obsidian fog of endless night. And she walks the familiar stairwells, wounded and tangled and unfamiliar in the cavernous dark. There is no one; no one to tend the flames, no one to rebuild. When war slit Runeterra's throat, the Institute, obsolete, was the first thing to fall.

In the ruins of that place, she hears them: the once-proud champions, saviors, ground to dust beneath the stones of their chapel.

All but one.

And she finds him where she left him, in the room at the top of the stairs. But the walls have all fallen away, and he is suspended there on that platform, the center of a mandala on a sea of coal-black feathers. Behind him, far away, the line of smoke-drenched mountains, the ever-burning fires of war.

His scythe is beside him, on the ground. She hesitates and then lays her own across it.

"Harbinger." Her voice, changed and perfected, faceted now like the face of a wild-cut diamond, hastens towards him like the red thread of fate.

But the light of his eyes, once-bright, has gone dark, and he makes no sound.

"Fiddlesticks," she tries, a commandment. Her breath catches; she is afraid.

And when he is quiet still, she humbles herself to kneel at the oaken stalks of his legs, draws back the violet ghost of her cowl. She takes his hands, cold like coins, into her own.

Death shuts her eyes while, far away, the red flames of war rage on and on and on.

"In your image," she says, "have I rewritten myself. And now for the love of you, I have returned. Without shame, without regret, at last the author of myself." She pauses, lips open, presses his hands to her face. "I have rewritten myself to deserve the only thing I have left to want in this life," she says. "To belong here, with the likes of you."

She is there in the soundlessness. And then the familiar sound, the wind that gasps across the hayfields, and she looks up in time to see the word fall from his mouth.

"Heavensent," he says smiling, in the old way. His eyes, the green of spring, of rebirth, behold her, the dusky stormcloud of her, the starlight that illuminates her face.

"Yes," the word rushes from her lips. She is nearly weeping now.

From out of the sky's black alleyway, blindfolded by smoke, it plummets like a drop from the tip of God's paintbrush and lands on her shoulder.

A crow.

And perhaps as Hades had been speechless to behold Persephone, goddess of spring, clad not in roses and rye grass and sunlight, but in silk and exile, in nightfall, like the first hazy whisper of a dream, when she first tested her weight in the seat of his bloody throne, the Harbinger of Doom was speechless to behold her.

She releases one of his hands and, from the pocket of her grey-black robe, withdraws a handful of sand and dull gold. She holds it out to him in her palm, which is steady like a citadel in a storm. "Reforge this world with me," she says, upturning her palm and leaving the aftermath of the hourglass on the floor at his feet.

"And what kind of world would they write?" he asks. "Death and his fallen angel?"

She stands, embraces him. "One that does not fear them," she says.

Everywhere at once, in every corner and in every crevice of heaven and earth, the world trembled, hemorrhaged.

And in the mirror held steady by fate: the dual incarnations of death, in whose love would root the seed of hope until the end of time itself.


The end.