Fiddlesticks

Real name: Fiddlesticks (Name Given From Children's Tales) Alias(es): The Ancient Fear, The Demon of Fear, The Demon of Horror, First of Ten Species: Demon Age: At least 10,998 years old Place of origin: Spirit Realm (Ancient Times) Current residence: Rocky Highlands, Demacia (No Fixed Abode)

Fiddlesticks is an ancient demon of fear, a presence so old that even the oldest surviving stories can only describe fragments of what it is. It does not possess a true mortal body. Instead, it gathers scraps of wood, metal, cloth, and farming tools around itself, building a crude scarecrow shape that lets it move through the world. Wherever fear takes root, stories of Fiddlesticks eventually follow, especially in isolated places where people vanish and survivors are left with little more than broken memories and terrified warnings.

Fiddlesticks does not hunt like an ordinary predator. It stalks people by listening to them, learning the sounds they associate with terror, then repeating those sounds back in distorted fragments. Voices of loved ones, final screams, and half-remembered warnings become part of the creature’s arsenal. It has recently been drawn toward Demacia, where growing fear and unrest provide fertile ground for something that feeds on panic itself.

Appearance: Fiddlesticks has an extremely tall, skeletal, unnaturally thin build made from a mixture of ragged fabric, dark metal, wood, and exposed mechanical joints. His upper body is wrapped in dirty beige burlap with heavy stitching, tears, uneven seams, and dangling strips of cloth. His head is formed from the same worn sack-like material, stretched into a long distorted shape around an enormous open mouth packed with multiple rows of jagged dark teeth. Small glowing red eyes sit deep above the mouth. Black feather-like spikes and twisted dark projections rise from behind his head, while a large rusted saw-blade-shaped metal piece curves behind the skull.

His torso is narrow and partially hollow, with dark iron ribs, braces, hinges, and jointed supports visible beneath the torn cloth. Long crooked arms extend from the shoulders through exposed metal frameworks, with sections wrapped in burlap, rope, and rusted bands. One shoulder carries a broad riveted metal brace, while both forearms transition into elongated blade-like mechanical limbs. His hands terminate in long hooked metal claws with thin pointed digits. Several keys hang from cords around his neck, and additional strips of cloth, rope, buckles, and scavenged metal parts remain tied around the upper body.

His lower body consists almost entirely of long blackened mechanical struts with exposed pivots, bolts, curved braces, and sharp hooked extensions instead of conventional legs. The feet end in narrow claw-like metal points. He carries an enormous improvised scythe built from a long crooked wooden shaft and a broad rusted blade with serrated, broken-looking edges and dark red-black sections near the cutting surface. A small lantern hangs from another long support, built from dark metal with a muted yellow interior, while loose straps, ropes, and thin dangling pieces trail from various parts of his frame.

Personality: Fiddlesticks does not possess a human personality in any normal sense. It imitates speech without truly conversing, repeating stolen phrases because they frighten the people who hear them. Its behavior is driven almost entirely by predation, and it appears to understand fear far better than it understands compassion, loyalty, or reason. What seems like mockery is usually imitation sharpened into a weapon.

Its closest relationships are therefore not friendships but connections through terror. Demacian villagers and soldiers know it through stories, disappearances, and the voices it leaves behind, while other demons belong to the same broader supernatural order without necessarily sharing any loyalty with it. Fiddlesticks stands apart even among such creatures because fear itself is central to its existence, making anyone who panics around it both prey and a source of strength.

Fiddlesticks possesses powerful fear magic, allowing it to overwhelm victims with supernatural terror until they flee or become unable to act rationally. It can also drain vitality directly from living beings through Bountiful Harvest, feeding on several victims at once while restoring its own damaged form.

Its most destructive manifestation is Crowstorm, which surrounds it with a violent murder of supernatural crows that tears into everything nearby. Fiddlesticks can also attack with the long scythe built into its scarecrow body, using the hooked blade to slash through targets or drag its reach across a wider area.

The scarecrow itself functions less like conventional armor and more like a shell assembled around the demon. Fiddlesticks can abandon stillness with sudden, unnatural movement, disguise itself among ordinary scarecrows, and exploit darkness or concealment before revealing itself at close range. Its body may look crude, but the thing inside it is far older and more dangerous than the materials holding its shape together.