The Dream-Eater in Color

In the twin cities, where glitz and filth intermingle, Tobias, a destitute painter living beneath a Piltover bridge, trades his last coin for a tube of strange “living paint” in Zaun’s black market. Like a living poison, the paint senses and consumes powerful emotions, giving paintings a brief, twisted life and even tearing open the veil of reality. When the sorrowful girl in one of his paintings comes alive on a rainy night, her tears turning into a real downpour, Tobias becomes famous overnight. But fame also draws hunters out of the shadows and scrutiny from beneath the badge. He revels in the ecstasy of seeing his art come to life, but soon discovers to his horror that every brushstroke feeds on his vitality, and every painting he sells quietly erodes its owner’s mind. On the precipice between art and madness, an out-of-control painting called an “emotional antidote” tears reality apart and releases a demon that devours everything. Tobias is forced to make a final choice: use his own flesh and soul as the last pigment, sealing the demon inside the eternal prison of a self-portrait. At last, clutching the soul-devouring painting, he plunges into Zaun’s bottomless abyss, becoming art’s most brutal requiem and sacrifice. This is a dark fable about creation and destruction, desire and redemption, its bloodstained exclamation mark carved into the twin cities beneath their never-dimming neon and the ghostly glow of the sump.