The Fall of an Idol, Deuxième Partie - A Farewell Performance

The sequel following a maiden's downward spiral into dark obscurity.

The first chapter: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/champions-gameplay/uu2Ujihg-the-fall-of-an-idol

She stands center-stage in the small theater, more than enough to hold the capacity of the audience attending. She can see out clearly, not a single person occupies the balcony and the floor seats contain residents only up to one of the last few rows. She understands the reasoning for this, her manager had already informed her nearly a month prior. Back then she still performed her grand 3-level orchestra halls, but something happened that day. Despite excellent acoustics, her music could no longer reach the majority of the fans. Many listeners mostly from the 1st and 2nd balconies with much disappointment complained that the once powerful fortissimo and been replaced by a soft pianissimo. Not a single note could be heard by seven tenths of the crowd and full refunds started being handed out time and again. She struggled to make her sound travel farther, but with futility it was nary enough to appease just a few additional rows of floor seats. Here she is now, performing for a room only able to fit a third of those glorious stadiums' capacity at best. This her last performance, her musical career has been retired indefinitely, so she's decided to pay close attention to the concert and analyze just what went wrong.

She begins playing, she's already decided to perform her standard arrangement of pieces and so her first song will be a Hymn. It begins a strong allegretto whereas before she would have played allegro, but she can feel that something else is off and then she arrives to the second movement. Momentarily setting that feeling aside, she notices the strength of this movement is starting to wane from that of the first and she focuses her attention on this as she continues forward. With the addition of each movement, the power of her song continues to grow weaker as the voice of the Etwahl grows quieter and she strains herself, desperately infusing larger portions of her own magic into the song to attempt to compensate. Approaching the end of her first song, she goes back to the feeling she'd had at the beginning, but it's much clearer this time what it was. Her infrequent chords throughout the entire piece had fallen a half-note flat. Was the Etwahl out-of-tune? No, she was always certain to keep it tuned before every performance, tonight was no different. She could still hear it, A is exactly 440 and the 5th-note harmony is perfect. Maybe the strings had grown worn-down? No, she had just recently replaced them, they were still brand-new and she used the same expensive top-quality she always had. Whatever the reason for the sour chords it wasn't physical, so it had to be a product of either waning magiks or her declining mental state.

After a short round of applause and a moment to gather herself, she begins her second song the middle piece of her performance. Spiritually exhausted from her spent magiks in the first part, she begins an Aria at moderato and decides to split her magic evenly between the melody and harmony. Unlike the first song this one began much weaker, perhaps due to her cautious approach. She tried compensating for the frail melody by putting her focus into the harmony, but she knew this was backwards and the song came out sounding dull and uninspiring. She slowly began gaining her composure as the song progressed, finally upon reaching the 3rd movement her confidence in the melody returned yet the moderato she had decided on continued to create drag. Finally at a semi-confident point, she could finally focus her attention on the audience and see their reactions thus-far. Looking at the listeners' faces, to her dismay she could tell the reverberation of her notes was being dampened somehow, as though she had metaphorically lifted her foot from an invisible sustain pedal and she was steadily losing the audience's favor. At that moment a sharp pain shot through her body, starting from her chest and moving outwards. She knew this discomfort well from her League matches, she had expended too much of her life energy, her mana in a short amount of time, it was draining at an alarmingly faster-than-usual rate. She continued on and finished through, but one thing was apparent, with the crowd quickly losing interest in her concert, splitting her magickal energies as she was doing rather than putting full focus on both would have made this song a complete flop if she'd saved it for last. The audience gives a smaller applause and she signaled the stage-hand to call an intermission so she could recuperate her strength for the second half of the concert.

Despite the short break she was still tired, but her performer's heart tells her the show must go on. Starting her 3rd piece, she chose something meant to invigorate the crowd make their pulses race. In contrast to her song's purpose, at this point of the show it was the best she could muster to keep it at largo, even though she knew how counter-intuitive that may be. She was too tired to play both melody and harmony as she had done in her first 2, so this song sadly became a monotonous single-note melody. This let her put more emphasis into what was left of the song, but it became an empty shell of what it once was. A largo could never capture the audience's attention and it never had strong reverberation to begin with. The harmony was meant to cover for the melody's downtime, but she was simply too weak to play it. Her song remained consistent throughout each of its movements, but it was never able to draw the listeners' attention in the first place and ended without applause.

With great sadness she moved on to the finale. Her shortest song with only 3 movements instead of 5, but also her most acclaimed. She wasn't certain, but it looked as though a few late-comers no more than a half-dozen came in at this moment just to hear. She'd heard a rumor that the box office was offering finale-only tickets. She didn't mind, she herself knew that all of her other songs had lost their shine, this was the only one she had left. She called it "The Crescendo" and even now its irresistible notes ring out as consistently strong as ever, each person that heard it was quickly drawn to their feet and began to dance. It was exhausting to play though, requiring her to use up more life energy as it continued on into the 2nd and 3rd movements. She concluded with the usual commendation, but the failures of her first three pieces still weighed heavy on her heart. The current fell on her last performance, but no encores were requested, no curtain calls were made. It was clear this was to be the end.