Lore[]
Visions pour in.
No mercy from my mind tonight.
I stand in a glade and imagine it drowning in sights unreal. Grass melts. Rocks swirl into twisted faces. Leaves turn to liquid and drip down branches, bleeding into pools.
The moon is a closed eye.
Brush in hand, my ethereal palette emerges.
Memories resurface.
I repaint, relive...
A man burned before me in his own armory.
Around us sweltered a painted fire with flames the color of daybreak. Its golden core beat with pain—with every wound his weapons had ever inflicted. The blaze climbed the walls, but did not catch, shedding neither ash nor smoke and spreading only as far as I willed it.
Yet it flared more vibrantly, more violently, than any real fire.
The man writhed. His senses scorched deeper than bone. He reached toward a weapon rack lined with serrated carvers—Noxian steel with Kashuri handiwork.
Kashuri, the thought arises. Still far, each step farther from Koyehn.
These blades were used to maim and kill. He caused suffering; he deserved to suffer.
Rendering the flames of a forge, I drew answers out of him. Who he worked with, for how long, why. His fury strained through every gasp. My painting thrashed in his eyes, mirroring every drop of wrath.
To make it stop, he offered everything. Money. Arms. Revenge, by his hand. But the only thing I cared about was this moment between us. Every vision that burdened me became his burden. The fire surged from my imagination into his, lightening the weight of my mind.
I kept my art from destroying him. We both now live with the marks of this, but while he chokes within flashbacks of the inferno, I survive in it.
The tide pulls me away. I repaint, relive...
A woman ferried me across troubled waters.
Around us, a golden-drawn breeze—dappled lights with specks of lantern bugs.
We sat across from each other. Gulfweed clambered from the surf and gripped the oars. Water lilies grew from the wellspring of my mind, an offering; I shaped them. The gulfweed took the painted blossoms instead, prying them apart.
The woman’s hands found rhythm. The course was not always like this, she said. She had been forced to carry marauders, arms runners, assassins, all with dark intent that seeped into the channel, which grew sick with chop and murk.
In her voice, a deep-stained guilt.
I listened. I gathered color from my palette and matched the sweeps of her oars, creating lilies and life anew—carps in the plums and oranges of sunset. I inspired her to recall kind memories from beneath layers of pain. Everything that burdened her became my burden.
The canal turned from lashing the pieces within itself to cradling them. The lines of the woman’s eyes furled with gentle joy. Somewhere in our minds, birds sang.
Our steadied thoughts, steadied hands, brought us to safer shores.
There’s light to what lives in my mind, and I can choose to paint that way. But... light always casts a shadow. I repaint, relive...
An artist stood beside me in a Koyehn studio.
Around us, inky blackness broken by candlelight. Far below an open window, the ocean—a violet gorge with seafoam for teeth, consuming itself over and over. The Temple of Koyehn stood for what would become its last night.
“All things must end,” said 
Jhin.
He watched a candle burning. I looked to the tide.
“I hope you enjoyed your time here,” I said.
He was still as death. “What does a wave feel for the rock upon which it crashes?”
Everything, I thought. Nature is emotional—capricious and harmonious.
“Nothing,” I said, shrugging. “You feel more for Koyehn than that, surely?”
“This place showed me all I desired to see,” Jhin said, “except one, final piece.”
He turned toward me, and I, him. “Which is?”
“Your... painting, Hwei. The truth of it. I know forced performances, and you’ve always hidden something. I’d like to know what.”
My eyes widened. What color they were then, I couldn’t tell. What Jhin found churning within, I dreaded.
“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m true to myself.”
An eye opens on my canvas, searching for anything from Jhin—some envy, resentment, passion, sorrow... Any feeling to explain him.
When we meet again, I’ll greet him like before. Eat together. Watch as he shifts in a new light. Ask, “Why Koyehn? Why me?” And I’ll paint what I know of him, returning life to his murders, putting colors back on agonized faces—surrounding us with a darkness so bright, it becomes blinding, and so blinding, it becomes freeing.
Art saves me, yet it can shatter me. Sometimes, I think I’m already lost—
“No,” Jhin said. “You are not.”
I remember how he convinced me to reveal my art. But I still paint arms to hold my past self back. Eyes to glower. Mouths to scream. At the same time, the arms push, the eyes behold, the mouths goad.
In past and present, I lift the brush...
I’ve finished tonight’s paintings.
Around me, black and gold—fractures of earth, light emitting from the chasms, songbirds in gilt cages, the infinity of an eye, straining with full veins.
The moon witnesses. Blot everything beneath it—Koyehn, Jhin—and I’m still left with myself.
The vision erupts. In its place, the forest is just the forest, holding itself together.
Tears draw down my face. My palette dissipates.
Awake, I dream of my next piece.