Work Text:
Naavori is a beautiful place at dawn. In the morning, right before the sun breaks the horizon, the reflected light from the clouds suffuses everything in a soft blue light. Hwei likes to sit on the roof of his studio. In the chilly morning breeze, the various rooftops light up from the sunrise, turning from dull glazed brown into shining red tiles.
The city of Koeshin is one of the largest in Naavori, and has grown larger still under Noxian rule. Hwei’s apartment studio is a converted temple; Noxians did not practice religion. Or at least not the peaceful sort.
He has been here for seven months. It’s the longest that he has ever settled down somewhere, after Koyehn. Hwei has to admit that it feels nice, sleeping in the same bed every night. Recognizing street names and nearby vendors. Becoming familiar with all of the city’s most beautiful sights.
Unfortunately, it probably won’t last much longer.
There had been another round of murders last night. A family of four, two parents, two children, had been drowned in the lake in the center of town. Their faces, frozen in fear, had been found under several layers of thick ice. The ice had been unusually clear. Unnaturally clear, like someone had boiled the water before freezing it to remove it of any impurities.
Hwei makes his way to the lake right at dawn, pushing his way through the gathering crowd. A grim-faced constable is trying to chip at the ice in order to get them free. For a brief, irrational moment, Hwei is annoyed at him for ruining the scene.
Then, a wave of shame and disgust washes over him.
That’s how he knows it’s Jhin. Jhin’s work always makes him feel like this.
He’s still sketching the scene when the constable finishes digging the bodies out. The ice chunks melt slowly in scattered piles on the frozen surface, turning into sludge as they catch the sunlight. Hwei ignores them for now, preferring instead to finish the image he had captured in his head. That first moment, with the untouched ice still intact.
The constable comes over to check on him once the crowd has mostly dispersed. He has the tired air of someone who has seen it all, but when he glances down at Hwei’s sketchbook, his eyebrows raise.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
Hwei shows him the sketch with the positions of all four bodies drawn out. Both the parents have their arms outstretched, reaching up as if throwing something upward. Both of the children are cartwheeling, their legs splayed out as if they had just been tossed up into the air.
“This wasn’t an accident,” Hwei says. “It was a murder.”
“Oh, I know that,” the constable scoffs. “I’m not blind.”
Jhin would be glad to hear that, Hwei reflects. His art would be useless without eyes.
“Who were they?” Hwei says sympathetically. His sketch is done; he puts it away into his satchel before the constable can ask any more questions about it. “Two parents, two children. Your community must be devastated.”
“I don’t know them,” the man says, unmoved. “They’re not from around here. But the children - the two kids. Those weren’t bodies. Those were dolls. Couldn’t tell without digging them up, them looking so lifelike and all.”
Hwei could tell, in that first moment. He decides not to admit it aloud. No one liked hearing about slight imperfections in their work.
“The man who did this,” Hwei says. “I’m chasing him. I’d like to know if something like this happens again.”
Around them both, men are working to load the cadavers into carts, to haul them away. There is a gaping hole in the lake, one that is slowly closing as the surface begins to freeze over again. Hwei can already feel Jhin’s presence leaving, like smoke beginning to fade.
“This is the devil’s work,” the man mutters under his breath, then spits.
Hwei's magic doesn't follow conventional rules. Or at least, it doesn't follow the conventional rules laid down by the temple masters of Koyehn. Nor rules laid down by the temple masters of any other isle, nor of any order of mages in Ionia. Hwei had wandered around Ionia for years, learning about other temples and being asked to join their ranks, only for them to shake their heads at the end and apologize to him, saying that they had no idea how his magic worked.
Ionia is like that, though. Even the scattered Kinkou Order, ancient as they are, held few answers for him.
But they did answer other things for him.
The Kinkou Order is where Hwei picks up Jhin’s trail again, even if the trail is several years old by this point. Here is where Hwei learns all about Jhin’s previous killings. Here is where he receives the first few descriptions of murders similar to the ones that had been committed in Koyehn.
No one had been able to describe the aftermath without becoming shaky and emotional. Hwei listens to them describe it almost as if it had been a religious experience, not the aftermath of a crime scene. It was clearly not just that. They had been able to witness Jhin’s art firsthand. Jhin’s art had left a lasting impression on them.
Hwei finds himself jealous of them, for some reason.
Shen is a hard-faced man. Hwei never manages to see past his mask, but the first time he sees Shen, he's briefly terrified by the concept of masks at all. Shen wears one that is blank and featureless, with carved-out eye holes that reveal shining blue eyes. It reminds Hwei uncomfortably of Jhin.
It's a long time before he can go a day without being reminded of Jhin.
It's here that he starts to put the pieces together. Jhin’s early days, his first few kills. Shen brings him several madmen who all rave about the bloody things they’ve seen. Hwei sketches a few experimental scenes based off of the descriptions he’d been given. To his surprise, the magic in him flows out with no effort at all.
The scenes come to life. Blurry details sharpen into focus in vivid technicolor. The night market lanterns on the page start glowing and float off of the page like fireflies. Hwei doesn’t need to look any closer to realize that they are bombs just moments from going off.
The witnesses take one look at his finished drawing and run away screaming.
It's here that Shen first tries to recruit him into hunting down Jhin for good. There is a pattern to how he kills, Shen explains. A few kills in each city, several months apart. Then a big show. Always a big show.
“We’ve been chasing after him for nearly a decade,” Shin says. “Each and every time we get close, Jhin…puts on a show. He digs out their deepest darkest fears. He puts them on display. Then he leaves and disappears. Those witnesses you spoke to all used to be members of our order that have been sent after Jhin. None of them have ever returned sane.”
Hwei shivers.
“Jhin already knows my worst fear,” he says. The drawing in his hands crumples into a wad of useless paper.
He looks up at Shen.
“I’m afraid of turning into someone like him,” he says. “Jhin already knows. He’s already seen it in me. That’s why it should be me this time, going after him. There’s nothing he can do to me that he hasn’t done already.”
Four days later, another murder shocks the town. By the time Hwei arrives on the scene, he can already tell that it’s Jhin’s work.
In the city square, another man has been chained down to the bottom of a huge glass tank. Seven metal chains stretch from various points of the floor to the man’s ankle. Searchlights attached to various points along the top of the tank shine bright lines through the water like slashes of a paintbrush.
The constable is there too, grimly closing off the streets and sending people away. He looks at Hwei and then grimaces, ignoring him in favor of chivvying another group out of the street.
Hwei sits down on the old cobblestones in front of the tank, all alone, and stares up at the murdered man as if it were a painting.
The placement of the searchlights look haphazard at first glance, but there’s a delicate balance to it. The longest one stretches diagonally across half of the top half of the tank, before hitting a cleverly hidden mirror and reflecting down to the ground, framing the drowned man in a way that makes the light look like it’s curving around him. Smaller beams of light scatter densely across the bottom half of the tank, and it’s the golden ratio, of course it is, Jhin had always been a fanatic.
Hwei’s paintbrush is out before he knows it. The canvas is unwieldy, spread across his knees, but he had never quite gotten used to smaller sketchpads and pencils. The first thing he does is trace out the pattern of the searchlights, breaking the canvas down into quadrants.
Then he paints. The drowned man, curiously enough, isn’t the main subject of this painting. The composition just isn’t quite right. The searchlights matter more than Hwei initially thought they would.
Halfway through his painting, he gets it.
If you look at it upside down, the drowned man looks like a carefree child, limbs splayed out, floating underneath a massive sky. The searchlights turn into balloon strings, dancing just out of reach from his outstretched fingertips. The balloons become glowing balls of light.
Hwei stares at the scene in front of him with a sick fascination. Jhin knows he’s here. The family in the lake had been a hello. This man was a message.
Then, suddenly, he can't bear to look at his painting anymore. It’s humiliating. Hwei shoves his canvas back into his satchel, not even waiting for the paint to dry. All he wants to do is to go back home and pretend that he had never seen this.
Had Jhin seen all of Hwei’s paintings about him? Had he realized what Hwei really thought of him? Did he see that and think, well, if Hwei was allowed to make art of him, that he was allowed to make art about Hwei as well?
The drowned man had curly hair, long and dark, haloed around his head in the water. Hwei doesn’t have to look up close to know that his eyes had been replaced, maybe with glass, probably with mirrors. He doesn’t know which he’d rather have it be.
Hwei realizes that he is shivering. He wonders if Jhin is watching him, even now.
Jhin is a serial killer, through and through. Shen and the Kinkou Order had assured him of that, with records and anecdotes and stories about the man spanning all the way back to his Zhyun days. Serial killers often return to the scene of the crime. Hwei knows this, but he also just can’t see Jhin making a mistake like that.
“Find everything alright?”
The constable, to Hwei’s surprise, had been waiting around for him to finish. Hwei looks around, pulled out of his reverie. The street, still blocked off for pedestrians, is empty and quiet save for the two of them. The sky was getting brighter with the morning light. Nearby street lamps were beginning to shut off.
Pulling back a bit, Hwei realizes how fortunate he had been to get here when it was still dark. In the daylight, the searchlights and the carefully thought out details behind the murder scene would have been washed away by the sun.
“Yes,” Hwei replies.
“Good,” the constable says, and then begins to shut off the searchlights, one by one.
Hwei jumps to his feet, distantly shocked by how visceral his response is. “Wait! What are you doing?!?”
The constable gives him a disbelieving look. “What do you think, boy? Show’s over. Somebody’s got to clean this mess up.” From his tone, it was clear that he had somehow found himself doing this job, and he didn’t enjoy it one bit.
“Just, wait one moment -” Hwei looks up at the murder scene once again, committing it to memory.
The constable shakes his head impatiently, having waited for him long enough, then pulls the plug. The entire tank goes dark. The man floating within it becomes nothing more than a shapeless blob, a bit of shadow lost amongst other shadows.
“I -” Hwei feels his indignation flare up again. He catches himself. Remembers to be polite. “Thank you,” he says to the constable. The other man didn’t have to wait around for him to finish painting, but he had anyway. Hwei supposes that he ought to be grateful.
“Any closer to catching him?”
Hwei looks blankly at the constable.
“Your guy,” the constable clarifies. “The one behind all these murders?”
Hwei pulls his satchel, with the art piece and his brushes stuffed into it, closer to his chest.
“Not quite,” he says. “But at least I know for sure it’s the same guy I’ve been looking for.”
Jhin was here. Hwei was sure of it now. Jhin was here, and he knew Hwei was on his tail, and he was telling Hwei to back off.
The constable snorts.
“Doesn’t sound like you’ve made much progress, then.”
Hwei shrugs. Jhin was here. In this city. Breathing the same air and walking the same streets and maybe, just maybe, watching the same sunsets. This was what he’d originally wanted, after all. That’s what he had come here for.
“There won’t be any more murders, at least.” Hwei says, turning to leave.
Because next, he’ll be coming for me.
The sun rises behind him as he makes the long trek back to his apartments, but Hwei can’t feel any of its warmth. He can’t stop thinking of the drowned man, reaching out toward the brightest thing in his painting. And the light reaching back, turning into chains, dragging the man down to his doom.
Over the next few days, Hwei completes the last of three paintings in an abandoned opera house in Naavori.
He had liked the opera house for its huge, stained glass windows and tall, vaulted ceiling. It had reminded him of the temples he’d grown up in. Art and worship, inextricably intertwined in a way that always made sense. It reminded him of simpler times.
Of places to die, in a strange city far away from his hometown, Hwei supposed it wasn’t too bad a choice.
He thinks that the best way to find Jhin is to make Jhin come to him. Jhin has made three kills already. Hwei would be his fourth.
Hwei has tried to kill Jhin two times before. This will be his third, and probably his last.
He hears Jhin come up the creaky stairs; his footsteps are loud in the reverent silence. Hwei doesn’t look back. If Jhin wants to end it now, he can; for some reason, though, Hwei suspects that he won’t.
Jhin sits down beside him, folding his knees up in a graceful, spidery motion. They both look up at Hwei’s painting for a long time.
“What do you think?” Hwei asks at last.
“It’s perfect,” Jhin says simply.
Hwei breathes a small sigh of relief.
“I didn’t believe that you would keep your promise,” he admits.
Jhin turns to look at him through his one eyed mask. “Hwei,” he asks seriously. “How do you think you found me?”
Hwei glances at him quickly, then has to look away.
“I’ve played the game by your rules,” Hwei says. “I’ve seen what you see. Your murders have started to feel like my own. I get it, Jhin, but the ending doesn’t change.”
Jhin smiles behind his mask. Hwei can hear it in his voice.
“You’ve never lacked for imagination,” Jhin says. “Maybe you’ll surprise me.”
Hwei leans back. Their shoulders brush. “Maybe I will.”
They both look at the painting again. The hushed silence of the opera house feels like a church chamber, as if a distant god had pressed his ear against the vaulted ceiling.
“Show me,” Jhin says.
The stage melts into an abstract landscape. An Ionian sunset. A distant figure standing at the top of a hill. A spirit tree. A noose, tied to a branch and swaying in the wind. A man, temporarily too preoccupied with the beauty of the sunset to remember what he had been doing.
Together, they stare at the sunset until the colors begin to swirl into an endless darkness.