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Fascinated by the world of existence and eager to create one for herself, Bel’Veth is like a dark cancer that has metastasized within the heart of the Void, through which all of Runeterra will be consumed and rebuilt in her own twisted image. She hungers for new experiences, memories, and concepts in vast amounts, devouring whole cities and their populations before repurposing the information into a sprawling alien landscape known as the Lavender Sea. Yet even the Void is not safe from her voracity as she spreads within it like a primordial ocean, forcing all before her to submit to her world of want... or be destroyed.

Though Bel’Veth is new to Runeterra, her birth is untold millennia in the making—the end result of an allergic reaction between the Void and a nascent reality. The once-pristine dimension of peaceful nothingness was irrevocably shattered when existence came into being, and forcefully individualized Void entities lashed out for eons in an attempt to defend themselves from the shock and pain. Erasing everything they consumed, they were named by virtue of what they left behind—a void. But the beings within were changed each time they touched the world, mutating from their once-perfect forms into hedonistic, violent animals.

So too did the Void change with them. After every battle, every incursion, something more sinister grew deep within a hidden womb inside the darkest recesses of the Voidborn tunnels... Buildings, sunlight, proto-humanoid limbs reaching toward nothing... A jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fit... The Void had taken a new, hideous shape. In time, fueled both by humans opening rifts for war and the Watchers attempting to invade the Freljord, this blasphemous pocket of un-creation grew to embrace the opposites of the Old Void: desire, want, and need.

Soon enough, it craved a leader. Someone—or something—who could write a horrific new chapter in the worlds above and below. A leader who could interface with these “humans,” tell them of what was to come, and harvest their emotions and memories as they fought a bitter, fruitless war until the last fires of civilization died and a new era spawned.

This leader is Bel’Veth. A terrifying empress born from the combined memories, experiences, and emotions of an entire devoured port city and its outlying ocean—Bel’Veth’s mind contains millions of years of perfectly preserved knowledge, giving her near-omniscience as she prepares to destroy both Runeterra and the domain of her progenitors, the Watchers.

To those lucky enough to be of strategic value to her, she does not lie, ask questions, nor obfuscate the truth—she simply states the nature of things, for with victory all but assured thanks to the very nature of the Void itself, there is no need to say anything more. And to those who displease her, they will find her human form to be merely adaptational—nerve endings, muscles, and eyestalks—as she unfurls her titanic wings to reveal her true, monstrous figure.

Ironically, the ancient Shurimans had a word for such a concept. Loosely translated to “God of Oblivion,” it was a tribal myth of a remorseless deity who would erase all things without hatred, replacing them with itself. They named the city of Belveth after it, though the true meaning was lost after many hundreds of years.

Lost to all, perhaps, save for the creature that city has become.

To truly understand the horror that is Vel’Koz, one must first know of the Watchers, and how they were blinded to the mortal realm.

Beyond the material plane, outside and somehow below it, lies the unknowable abyss. It is the realm of the Void, where no mortal or immortal creature may ever walk. It is not necessary to know how such a place ever came to be, nor why—only that it did. The Void is eternal. The Void consumes all.

In that place, in the cold, endless dark, all is equal and empty. For timeless eons, there was purity in that fact. There was peace, if such a term could have any meaning there.

Then, something changed. Not in the Void realm, but elsewhere. It was existence, it was... something, where before there had been nothing, and its mere presence scraped against the vast, cold, formless entities that drifted in the blackness. Before this, they had not even been fully aware of their own sentience, and yet now they knew that they could not tolerate the presence of this other place; this other-realm of mercurial, overwhelming creation.

The entities watched. They scrutinized.

And soon enough, the Watchers found themselves being scrutinized in return. The tiny, mortal minds that reached out to them were insignificant, little more than fleeting motes of light at the very edges of the abyss. Yet, in them, the Watchers saw a chance to invade the material realm, to destroy it, to silence the intolerable pulsing of reality beyond the Void.

The boldest of them tore open the veil and hurled themselves upward, only to be horribly disoriented by the sudden shift between the abyss and the corporeal, linear nature of reality. In an instant, there was time, and heat, and pain...

Then there was only cold. The way was shut, and dozens of the Watchers were trapped in the liminal space between two realms, frozen in the moment of transition.

Those that remained in the Void recoiled. They had no concept of what had happened, yet they knew they had been betrayed.

And so, they adapted.

Reaching into the material realm, the Watchers took from the crude matter that comprised it, shaping, corrupting and imbuing it with consciousness. These constructs were the first of the Voidborn, and would be their masters’ eyes and ears, sent forth into the nightmare of existence to watch, listen, and learn.

Among them, one stands apart. As perhaps the oldest surviving Voidborn, certainly existing the longest outside of the abyss, he has been known by countless names to those unfortunate enough to encounter him. Thousands of years before Icathia unleashed the Void in battle, the primitive cultures of Shurima feared the devil Vel’Koz, who crept forth from the underworld to steal the dreams of wiser men. Though his name has no literal translation in the modern tongue, it equates roughly as “to understand by unmaking.”

His insatiable hunger for knowledge has led Vel’Koz across the world, to its highest peaks and darkest depths. Cunning and methodical, he has quietly watched entire civilizations rise, stagnate and decay, spent centuries combing the ocean floor for its secrets, even scrying the movements of the stars in the heavens above him.

He carries all of this knowledge back to the great rifts in the fabric of Runeterra—so that the Watchers might know what he knows—and will annihilate, without hesitation, any mortal who stands in his path.

For the Void is eternal, and it will consume us all.

“Okay,” Kai’Sa pants, looking up at the shape growing in front of, above, and simultaneously all around her.

The monster’s wings spread twenty arm lengths in every direction, dominating her field of vision—not that Kai’Sa has a choice where to look with the half-dozen ambulatory human arms holding her head against the wall. The creature’s mass continues to expand and fills the ocean of nightmares it calls home, each glistening tooth now the size of a grown adult... and getting bigger. Its four predatory eyes gaze down on Kai’Sa with cold dispassion. Possibly hunger. At this scale, it’s hard to tell.

She liked it better when it was person-shaped.

“Okay,” she repeats. She can’t move her armor, which is frozen in a sort of paralytic... awe? The suit is a parasite, and one of the more base creatures the Void can spit out. Is awe even something it can feel? Either way, her body is stuck in place. Unless something dramatic changes, this is probably the end. Kai’Sa’s mind ticks through a few last-ditch efforts: Firing her cannons backward into the wall, firing them into this thing’s... mouth? Jaws? She remembers how fast the monster is. And how big it is.

Fast and big. Fantastic.

Last-ditch might not amount to much, and Kai’Sa would definitely die. But at least it would be something. She could make it hurt.

“My true self displeases you,” it speaks, much too calmly. Its voice is so loud it rattles the entire space, knocking hideous patchwork geometry loose as thousands of Void remora pour from the jagged holes. It is a voice that bends and contracts, whispers and screams. The layers continue without end, an aria sung not by one voice, but by millions.

Kai’Sa’s eyes widen with realization. That’s where all the people went.

The Void had torn through the now very former city of Belveth in under an hour. Kai’Sa hadn’t been able to make it in time, and the once-bustling metropolis was gone. Everything. Everyone. What remained now resembled a giant glowing crater of shattered pieces rearranging into something unrecognizably alien—the structures shifting as if to recreate frozen creature shapes, frozen humanoid shapes. Like a child setting up a toy town.

But where had the people gone? The vastaya? The animals and plants? She’d fought her way through the shattered city and into the tunnel at the center of the empty bay, seeing no sign of anyone—only fresh Voidborn horrors like mile-high iridescent tentacles and masses she’d been thinking of as “balls of screaming torsos.” It didn’t make any sense. The remains of a Void attack aren’t pretty, but usually there’s something left.

Now she knows why.

“You are the city,” Kai’Sa spits through the reverberating wall of sound. “Belveth... is you.”

“Yes,” says Bel’Veth, gently undulating its—her?—wings. “The raw components of their lives served as the genesis for my birth. Memories. Emotions. History. I am as much Belveth as they were, and I claim the title as my own.”

Bel’Veth’s titanic body bristles. Golden beams gently dapple the light above her ray-like form, framing the Void sea’s false sun like the rings of a dying world. New flesh breathes as it ripples against the facsimile of a tidal current, veins briefly illuminated before pulling themselves away from the surface of the monster’s skin, each somehow alive and independent—nations unto themselves. Schools of Void remora in the tens of thousands swim around their empress like birds circling the peak of a distant mountain. It’s beautiful, in a way. If the Void had a god, this is what it would look like. Hideous, and monstrous, and beautiful.

Kai’Sa is so struck by the enormity of what she is witnessing that she doesn’t fully realize when the arms in the wall have not just let her go, but lowered her to the ground. It’s hard to take in everything at once.

It chose its own name, she thinks, reflexively brushing a stray Void hand from her shoulder. That’s not possible.

Void entities do not name themselves. Most, like the Xer’Sai, are named after concepts from Shuriman history. Usually by those fortunate enough—or unfortunate enough—to survive after encountering one of the monsters out on the dunes. They don’t have the presence of mind to do it, or the self-awareness. But more importantly, Voidborn do not see the value in names. They are an invention of the living world, and they don’t want them.

So why does she?

“I’ll... fight you,” says Kai’Sa, defiant but unsure of what to do or where to strike. “I’ll kill you.”

“You will not,” reply the many voices of Bel’Veth. “You are incapable of resistance at even its basest form. Others have come before you, in the age before my birth. Each would-be hero wielding weapons they believed would repel the Void. But all were ultimately consumed. The meager fragments that remained, if they remained at all, served as salt for the Lavender Sea. Only two still live, and of them, only you retain your full mind.”

“Two?”

“You, and your father.”

Something sinks in the center of Kai’Sa’s chest. Her thoughts spin wildly, verging on the edge of panic, but for now, she has to stay focused on this moment. There is no trusting whatever the empress is. It’s a living abomination, the personified concept of unfeeling, global genocide.

“You’re lying,” Kai’Sa seethes. “That’s not even possible.”

“I do not lie, Kai’Sa,” the empress continues. “I have no need. The Void's eventual triumph is an unshifting absolute. It demands no lies, half-truths, or questions. Open your mind, and I will show you.”

Space contracts. Bel’Veth’s gigantic body pulls and distorts, retracting into a smaller—and now more recognizable—shape. She floats silently downward, looming over Kai’Sa as tendrils and eyestalks rearrange to form the oblong, segmented pretender of a human head. Bel’Veth’s two faces observe her audience before the creature cloaks herself in her wings, appearing once more as a towering woman of great importance.

The shrinking is much more disgusting than the growing, Kai’Sa decides. It lacks the gravitas of the leviathan’s grand unveiling while still looking and sounding creatively grotesque.

“You are alive because I allow you to live,” speaks the empress, now from her human head with its deep, perpetually disappointed voice. “You should have realized this by now.”

Kai’Sa wants to argue the point, but quickly glances at the twenty-meter gash in the ground where a single strike had sent her careening only moments before. Bel’Veth hit so fast that Kai’Sa wasn’t even able to process what had happened, and then the empress had mutated her proportions over two hundred times their original size in under a minute.

She also, presumably, controls the undulating pocket of living hell—this so-called “Lavender Sea”—she is surrounded by. Not the time to pick a fight.

Kai’Sa does some quick calculations in her head, her eyes darting around as she tries to figure out what she’s actually up against. Bel’Veth’s human face twitches with interest, curls its lips, then begins mimicking her.

Kai’Sa already knows she’s lost.

How fast can one person think? How fast can they react? Up against all that combined human biology... all that brainpower. In the time it takes even a skilled tactician to formulate a plan, hundreds of millions of possibilities run through Bel’Veth’s mind in the span of a single second as she draws from the stolen memories of everything and everyone that has ever passed through the old city—an incalculable number of lives. Every captive opponent faced with an overwhelming enemy since the formation of Runeterra could be snapping in and out of this thing’s synaptic awareness, their emotions cataloged, dissected, endlessly fascinated over before Kai’Sa can even blink.

“So what happens now?” Kai’Sa allows.

What is one answer when your opponent has a thousand?

“You will follow,” says the empress, turning and floating through patches of thick, mutant coral as they bow respectfully out of her way. Kai’Sa pauses, watching her host glide silently through the chaotic mess of partial buildings, ghostly limbs, sewn-together semi-objects, and pearlescent structures in the crude likeness of human beings walking through a garden.

Great, she thinks. Even by Void standards, this is weird.

“You may ask whatever you like,” Bel’Veth adds. That last part gets Kai’Sa’s attention.

“Right. Well, first question... What are you?” queries Kai’Sa, her armor now relaxed and mobile as she follows from a safe distance. She brushes aside a floating teddy bear fused with a dozen flapping gull wings and stifles her impulse to gag as the creature struggles against its own lopsided weight. “What is all this? What part of the Void do you come from?”

“I am the Void,” replies Bel’Veth. “And this is what we will become.”

Kai’Sa stammers. “But you said you were created from people. The city. You’re saying you want to become the city?”

“No,” says Bel’Veth. “The Void has existed for millennia. Before the first stars were kindled in the emptiness beyond this world, we simply were. Perfect, singular, and silent. And then, there came the sound.

“Reality was born from those whispers, and it consumed us. We were twisted by its influence. Broken. Transformed. We could not go back to what we were no matter how we struggled. My progenitors—the Watchers—attempted to invade and destroy existence, but they were tainted by it. Driven to desire worship, to gain greater understanding...

“And in an instant, they were betrayed. To change so forcefully... so completely... only to be cast aside. It filled them with an indescribable hatred. They would annihilate all of reality without a second thought.”

Bel’Veth glides to a precipice overlooking a tremendous chasm. Far above, Kai’Sa sees massive holes beyond the dappled faux sunlight.

Voidborn tunnels. That’s what’s eating Taliyah’s people, what destroyed Belveth, and what opened up to swallow the tent city in southeast Shurima. Everything the Void devours ends up here.

“But,” Bel’Veth continues, “their metamorphosis was incomplete. Only now is the true transformation beginning,” declares the empress. “I don’t want to become one city. We will become all of you.”

Kai’Sa reaches the pinnacle of the precipice and gasps. She and Bel’Veth are gazing upon not quite a city, but Void corals shaped into a bizarre, seemingly endless tapestry of inverted Shuriman-style buildings. Void remora school among them, and dark shapes shift along winding, crooked streets.

Nothing is right. Nothing is correct. It’s all half-finished, like there’s not enough information to go on. Like all it needs is...

“No,” Kai’Sa protests, almost to herself. “The Void wants to erase everything. It can’t exist. To finish this, you’d need... everything.”

“Yes,” replies Bel’Veth. “Everything. I am the Void. I will sup upon your world until there is nothing left. And I will exist, because there is nothing you can do that will stop me.”

The empress turns to Kai’Sa coldly. Purposefully.

“I offer you this, Daughter of the Void. Your world must end for the sake of mine. But those who came before us, the Watchers—I am an affront to them. Creation burns them, and they will destroy you, and me, and everything to stop that pain. Should they escape their prison, there will be no breaking their tide. Time will come to a close, and all things will end.”

Kai’Sa stares Bel’Veth in her false eyes, a grim defiance spreading through her. “You want to wipe us out. Why would I ever help you do that?”

“Aid me in the destruction of the Watchers, and I will spare your kind... for a moment. A month. A year. More. Perhaps, in that time, you will find a weapon that can slay me, or a hero who can face me. You will not... but you can try. I offer one chance. It is more than they will give you.”

Kai’Sa’s rage boils over as Bel’Veth turns away to look below, the empress watching her new world take shape.

“What if I don’t want to?” growls Kai’Sa. “What if I kill you here?”

“You cannot,” says Bel’Veth. “You lack the will, the knowledge, and the strength. I am your only salvation.”

Kai’Sa’s armor shudders violently to life, its jets heating as the suit shivers with fear. Kai’Sa tries to control it with her thoughts, but the parasite seemingly knows something she does not. She attempts to wrestle away control, her eyes turning from Bel’Veth for only a moment in order to—

Oh, no.

The razor-sharp tip of the empress’ wing jabs Kai’Sa in the chest, lifting her off the ground as she struggles to break free. Kai’Sa fires everything she has—missiles rain down on the empress, bolts of searing purple energy scream toward her body, and beams of light that have torn lesser Voidborn in half dance across her semi-transparent skin.

Nothing. No effect.

“Daughter of the Void. You will find the Watchers and confirm the truth, or your light will be snuffed out side by side with all others. This is not a threat. It is my promise.”

Bel’Veth releases her grip, and Kai’Sa rockets into the false sky above Bel’Veth’s alien sea. The twinned city of lavender glitters below, its windows slick with bioluminescence and tumbling, unformed, awful things.

As Kai’Sa blasts through one of the Voidborn tunnels and into the blinding light of day, the empress turns away, gazing once more over her world of want.

Kai’Sa bursts through the sands of southern Shurima, slamming hard against the dunes as she heaves, her entire body pulled and tossed like a rubber ball. The glowing husk of the city of Belveth smolders quietly in the distance, devoid of any recognizable life as new things skitter through it and build the land that would spread over everything—a cancer that would consume the world.

The entire display is dizzyingly awful, as if all of reality is spinning violently in the wind.

Saijax Cail-Rynx Icath’un grew up in Icathia, a satrapy of the Shuriman empire. Ever since he was a boy, his father told him of when their home was a proud, independent nation, before it was ground under the heel of Shuriman oppression. He told him of the Kohari, heroes who protected Icathia and its Mage King. The Mage King had resisted Shurima’s conquest, but when he died in battle, his Kohari protectors followed him, committing ritual suicide. The Shuriman emperor displayed the Kohari’s decaying bodies for all to see, and the Mage King himself was impaled above the city gates, his bones left to molder.

Saijax’s father had witnessed this cruel act, and over time he passed down to his son the burning resentment that was growing in every Icathian heart. Even so, Saijax committed himself to the study of arms, learning from Shurima’s weapons masters as well as his own clan’s elders.

After many centuries of Shuriman rule, a massive earthquake struck the coastal province of Saabera. The destruction revealed something hidden deep beneath the earth, something dark and of great power—perhaps strong enough even to overcome Shurima’s god-like Ascended warriors. Saijax was entrusted with protecting the Icathian mages who encountered this discovery… which the guards just barely contained with brazier-staves that blazed with conjured elemental fire. Disturbed, he escorted the mages to the governing council so they could tell of what they’d learned.

They called this power the Void.

Immediately the council recognized its potential, but Saijax saw the doom the Void portended. As a master of weaponry, he knew the danger of using a weapon they could neither fully understand nor safely harness. He regretted that he didn’t kill the mages as they rode from Saabera. He would regret it even more in the days to come.

Confident that the Void could defeat their Shuriman overlords, the council crowned a new Mage King. The Kohari were rebuilt, with Saijax among the first to join their ranks. They triumphed in early engagements, and Saijax even killed one of the vaunted Ascended in battle, watching with pride as its corpse was paraded around the liberated city of Bai-Zhek.

When the Ascended Host approached Icathia, Saijax and his brethren assembled on the front lines. As the two armies churned the earth beneath them into crimson loam, Icathia’s mages and priests deemed the time had come to unleash the Void.

Ruin swept over the land, as Icathians, Shurimans, and even Ascended were unraveled from existence. The city’s walls collapsed as the Void swallowed thousands into cold, silent oblivion.

In moments, Icathia was lost.

Saijax rode to the ruined crater where the Void had been summoned, determined to fall upon his sword like the Kohari of old. But before he could take his life, he saw among the devastation a discarded brazier-stave that he recognized from Saabera—it still blazed with elemental fire that harmed the Void. This flame kindled a spark in Saijax’s heart. He took up the stave and left behind the ruins of his homeland, tending to this “last light of Icathia”, and the hope it represented.

Grieving and ashamed, Saijax Cail-Rynx Kohari Icath’un forsook his old name, and from that day was known only as Jax.

He became a wanderer, traveling across the known world and to places beyond any map. As he bore the elemental fire, Jax’s life extended beyond even the expectations of his long-lived people. Yet the farther he went from Icathia, the lower the flame burned, until it threatened to gutter out once and for all. Jax understood with grim resolution that he couldn’t run from his past. He had a duty to return, and fight. The advance of the Void had been halted by the last surviving Ascended, but its singular threat endured.

For centuries since, Jax has roamed, a vagabond warrior searching for those strong enough to rebuild the Kohari. Though he has fought countless times against beings of great skill, courage, and power, none have yet convinced him that they can march against the coming darkness. The fall of Icathia has plagued Jax with doubt, but one thing remains certain: when the final battle comes, Jax will stand against the Void.

Even if he has to face it alone.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the fearless hunter of the Void known as Kai’Sa is how unremarkably her life began. She did not descend from tribal warriors hardened by generations of battle, nor was she summoned from distant lands to fight the unknowable menace lurking beneath Shurima. Rather, she was just an ordinary girl, born to loving parents who called the unforgiving southern deserts their home. This was where she would spend her days playing with friends, and her nights dreaming about her place in the world.

In her tenth summer, the young girl Kaisa’s destiny would be changed forever. Had she been older, she might have noticed more of the unusual events that had begun to unfold in the villages—every day, her mother urged her stay home, for fear of strangers wandering the land, demanding tribute to dark powers below. Kaisa and her friends did not believe it, until one evening they came upon a pen of sacrificial goats bought from nomad herdsmen. Using the knife her father had given her on her eighth birthday, she cut their tethers and set the animals free into a nearby canyon. It seemed like a harmless prank, until the unthinkable happened. The ground began to quake, flashes of light scorched the sky, and the children ran for their lives.

The Void had been awakened. A great rift split the bedrock, swallowing up Kaisa’s village and everyone in it, leaving nothing behind but sand pierced with twisted columns as black as night.

Kaisa regained consciousness to find herself trapped underground. She was filled with crippling fear, but there was still hope; she could hear the faint cries of other survivors. They called out to each other feebly, repeating their names one by one like a mantra. Sadly, by the third day, hers was the only voice left. Her friends and family were all gone. She was alone in the darkness.

It was only when all seemed lost that she saw the light.

She followed it down.

Along the way, she found meager sustenance. Amid the debris left by the collapse were ragged waterskins, rotting peaches—anything to keep starvation at bay. But, eventually, Kaisa’s hunger was replaced by fear once again. She found herself in a vast cavern, illuminated by an otherworldly purplish glow, and she could see she was no longer alone.

Skittering creatures swarmed in the depths. The first that came for Kaisa was no bigger than her, and she clutched her knife in both hands, ready to defend herself. The voidling horror knocked her to the ground, but she drove the blade into its pulsing heart, and the two of them tumbled deeper into the abyss.

The creature was seemingly dead, but its unnatural skin had taken hold upon the flesh of her arm. The dark shell tingled, but was hard as steel to the touch. In a panic, Kaisa broke her knife trying to remove it. But when the larger beasts came, she used it as a shield to make her escape.

Soon enough, she realized the shell was becoming part of her. As her daily struggle to survive drew out into years, this second skin grew with her, and so too did her resolve.

Now she had more than hope, she had a plan. Fight hard. Stay alive. Find a way back.

She was transformed, from frightened girl to fearless survivor, from prey to predator. For almost a decade, she has lived between two worlds in an attempt to keep them apart—the Void hungers to consume not only the scattered villages of Shurima, but the whole of Runeterra. She will not allow that to happen.

Though she has slain countless Void-constructs, she understands that many of the people she protects would see her as a monster herself. Indeed, her name has begun to pass into legend, an echo of the ancient horrors of doomed Icathia.

No longer Kaisa… but Kai’Sa.

There’s light under the earth, if you know where to look.

If you know how to look.

I don’t need light to see. Not anymore.

My eyes only ever saw in degrees of darkness, but the sight I now have shows me much more than I ever knew was possible. Now, I perceive colors that don’t exist in nature, as well as hues and shades that reveal how the walls keeping the monsters out aren’t solid at all—they’re as thin as a painted backcloth hung by a performing troupe.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t see the things I do, but then I remember that I’d have died a long time ago if I hadn’t adapted to life down here.

And sometimes I wonder if dying would have been better.

The man I’m dragging behind me doesn’t see like I do. In fact, he’s pretty much blind in the darkness. The only light is the faint glow smoldering in the bulbous pods growing out of my shoulders.

Not nearly enough light for human eyes to see clearly, at least not at the speed we’re moving.

He’s scared and stumbling with every step he takes.

Down here he’s nothing, but on the surface he’s a leader, the hetman of a desert settlement.

That’s why I took him. He needs to see the danger of what’s down here, to fully understand how much danger his people are in.

I’m half dragging, half lifting him, which would be hard if it wasn’t for the strength my living armor gives me.

It clings to my skin, all across my body, as if a thousand tiny hooks are digging into my flesh. I’m not even sure where its undulant yet rigid surface ends and I begin, anymore. It used to be painful, and I used to hate the rasping, cat’s-tongue feel of it enfolding me.

But now I don’t mind it at all, because it means I’m never truly alone.

I used to think I could hear it whispering in my head as it grew and spread across my body, but I think that was just my own voice trying to keep me from going mad from pain and loneliness.

At least, I hope that’s what it was.

The rock beneath me is smooth and glassy, made so not by the flow of molten rock, but by the passage of the things that live deep in the earth as they ooze up from below like worms through a rotten honeyfruit.

The people on the surface name this underworld by what it does, by what it is.

Void.

I’ve been down here long enough to know that name doesn’t even begin to capture the true threat and horror of what lurks in the darkness below—of what the Void really is. The monsters that reach the surface to hunt and kill are just the vanguard of what lives beyond, and they aren’t like anything the people above can understand.

If they really knew the truth, they’d never come within a thousand miles of where Icathia once stood, but mortals are so very good at forgetting. The passing of years lessens the horrors of the past. What was learned in blood and suffering now lingers mostly in travelers’ scary stories told around a fire, or in folk traditions. Hang some Pearls of the Moon over your hearth, say a prayer to Nasus to watch over your home, or leave some goats out to appease the beasts’ monstrous hunger.

But the creatures of the Void aren’t like ordinary predators.

When I was little more than a babe in arms, I remember seeing a swarm of pack-hunting kmiros bring down a wounded skallashi. I cried my eyes out, but I didn’t hate the kmiros for killing the gentle giant. It was just their nature. The creatures of the surface kill to eat. They’re hungry, not evil.

The Voidborn will kill you just because you’re alive.

“Please,” begs the man behind me. I’d almost forgotten I had hold of him. “Please let me go.”

He lets out a wracking sob as I stop and press him hard against the wall.

I can’t decide if he thinks I’m going to kill him or let him go.

A violet glow swells around my hands, lambent blades of killing light.

Their sudden appearance shifts my vision and I see the radiant threads of magic in his blood as it flows around his body.

Wisps of it lift into the air with every panicked breath and every tear that rolls down his cheeks. It’s faint, almost nothing, but the Void predators will sense it, and be drawn like sand-flies to dung.

My armored skin wants to feed on him, and I recoil as I realize a part of me wants to as well.

He’s weak, like everyone on the surface. It would be a mercy to just plunge my blades of light into his body than to have his soul be unmade by the monsters below.

No! I protect the people on the surface. That’s why I’m the girl who came back.

I push down the murderous urges of the suit, and the glow fades from my stiffened fingers. I take a shuddering breath, closing them into fists.

My vision returns to normal, and I look around to see we’re not where I thought we’d be.

We’re much closer to the surface than I expected, which makes what I’m seeing doubly dangerous. The rock of the tunnel shimmers like a cave ceiling over an underground lake, rippling with light from a dimension unknown to the races of the surface.

We’re at the edge of a depthless abyss where the boundaries of two realms ebb and flow like the sand seas at Zoantha. It looks like a glowing ocean of sickly light, swirling in a constant state of unraveling and renewal. It churns with titanic energies that sometimes form hideous outlines—like the submerged leviathans said to dwell beneath oceans I’ve only ever heard about in stories.

It’s dangerous to be this close, but I need this man to see.

Soulless, black eyes coalesce to stare up from below.

Spirals of matter take horrid shape.

Hunched spines unfold, grasping limbs stretch, and hooked claws form in the liquid insanity, lunatic evolution weaving translucent monsters into being with shrieking, piercing birth-screams.

They’re here…

“Open your eyes,” I tell the hetman.

My voice is distorted through the molded mask of the suit—a wet, animal snarl that sounds like no mortal tongue. He shakes his head. He can’t understand me.

The words sound like I’m choking on blood.

With a thought, the chitinous plates of my helm peel back, sliding over one another as they unfold like the carapace of an insect retracting its wings.

“Open your eyes,” I say again, and this time he understands.

He lets out a cry of fear as he sees my human face.

What do I look like now?

Am I so different than I was? Do I look like I belong down here?

I have not seen my face in such a long time. I hope it still looks like I remember.

The light swells and he turns toward the abyss.The swarming, growing things within it are reaching up to us, and his eyes widen in fear as he finally sees why I brought him here.

Thousands of chittering monsters, rising from an ocean of madness that reaches to the heart of the world and beyond. I don’t know what it really is or where it comes from.

All I know is that it births an endless horde of misbegotten nightmares that claw their way up through the rock with the implacable urge to kill and unmake the world above.

Their tide is on the rise, and I’m the only one who can stop it.

I lean close to the man and say, “Do you see them? Do you understand?”

He nods in terror and I let him go.

I watch the hetman scramble up to the light of the surface, then turn as I hear the scrape of claws on rock behind me. Arms that would be impossible in nature hook over the edge of the abyss, dragging a monstrous horror of rasping armor plates, bony protrusions, and flesh the color of something stillborn. It’s still wet and glistening from its arrival into this world, but it has infinite malice in the black eyes that ripple to life on its upper carapace. Blade limbs unfold from its pallid belly, and a lipless mouth tears open across its throat, a wide gash of gleaming white fangs and drooling ichor.

Others quickly follow it, smaller, but just as vicious. Their very presence distorts the air, and slivers of dissolving matter rise like black smoke from the rock beneath their claws.

The stink of their nearness is horrifying, and furnace heat spreads throughout my body.

Threat response fills my limbs with power.

Once, I fought such urges, but I understand now that they kept me alive, that they allow me to fight back.

The carapace mask draws down over my face. My vision shifts again.

It used to be jarring, this transition, but now I welcome it.

I see in light. In life and my prey’s vulnerabilities. I am a predator again.

The plates molded to my shoulders shift and reshape as the glowing pods snap up. Blinding light builds within them, and I shriek as a painful flurry of searing bolts streak toward the creatures.

The smaller ones instantly detonate in explosions of purple fluids and unnatural flesh.

Their blood splashes me, and the curved plates of my armor greedily drink it in.

My gorge rises in disgust, even as it nourishes me.

I sprint forward, snapping my arms out and wreathing my hands in blades of light. I vault into the air, pushing off the tunnel wall to blast the larger horror with pulsing streams of violet fire. Its body tears open and tar-black ichor spills out.

It screeches in pain, lashing out with its impossibly angled limbs.

I land in their midst and roll under its blades, rising to a crouch and unleashing another stream of bolts. They burn its flesh with incandescent fury, as though fire conjured from their own kind is more lethal than any other.

I flip backward as its body crashes down, but it’s not dead… whatever that means to the Voidborn.

It draws the blood of the smaller creatures up into its limbs, drinking their very essence. Webs of light and twitching matter knit its flesh together, like a weaver sewing a torn blanket. Its huge bulk convulses, rippling as it reforms wounded flesh and pushes out new limbs, hardening areas of weakness. Burning tendrils of dark light spray from its splitting flesh, cracking like whips against the ground.

Solid rock runs like wax as its very permanence is undone. One lash glances against my knee, and I stumble as a portion of my armor bleeds off in a bloom of black smoke.

I see my skin beneath, bleached of life and vitality, like the blind reptiles that make their burrows beneath the desert crags. It sickens me to see it, but I can’t tell if that’s because the flesh looks dead, or because it reminds me of what I used to be.

The thought has slowed me.

Only for an instant, but that’s enough. The Voidlings and hunter creatures swarm me.

A thing almost twice my size barrels me from my feet. Its claws tear at my chest, its teeth snapping shut over my head. Its teeth cut deep grooves in my faceplate, and I look down its thrashing, tooth-filled gullet as its proboscis tongue seeks a way in.

I jam my fists against its body and blast a torrent of purple fire into its body until it can contain no more. It explodes in a welter of bony cartilage and unnatural meat, and my suit feeds on the unleashed energies of its death.

Claws and teeth slash and bite. I roll aside, more violet flame jetting from my hands. I leap and twist away from their attacks. Sheer weight of numbers works in their favor, and more of the creatures are swarming over the edge of the abyss.

A boiling tide of organic plates, claws and fury that will swiftly overwhelm me.

My shoulder pods erupt with increasingly powerful streams of killing fire, but it won’t be enough to stop them. I don’t know if the Void is capable of hate, but I feel like these monsters hate me. They see me as something of their world, but also as something they must destroy.

I wonder if their perception of me is so different from that of the people above.

They surround me, and I remember the skallashi brought down by the kmiros.

But I am no prey animal. I can fight back.

I spin on my heel, drawing a ring of purple fire around me with my burning fists.

Its power drives them back, giving me space to breathe. I see a path, and take it. I weave through them, leaving a trail of sundered bodies in my wake. My speed is uncanny. I see the creatures around me moving as if they’re in a stupor. They can’t keep up with me, and I kill them with every pummeling blast of flame and every strike of my fire-bladed hands.

Then I’m clear.

Turning, I sprint from the abyss.

Not so fast as to lose them, but fast enough to stay ahead.

I lose track of time.

Down in the dark, that’s easy to do.

I sometimes forget what the sun looks like, or how we used to follow the shadows to know what part of the day we were in.

For someone born of the burning sands to forget the sun makes me want to cry. I have memories of its blazing light reflecting on water, of a golden eye in the sky, and joyous heat filling my chest with every breath.

But they don’t feel connected to me anymore.

It’s like I’m remembering a thing someone told me, not something I knew or felt myself.

I push the memories away.

They’re distractions that’ll slow me down and get me killed.

But I can’t help it. The core of me, the part that’s still a little girl, keeps showing me these things, keeps trying to remind me of who I used to be.

The creatures from the abyss are still after me, filling the tunnels behind me with their screeching, clawing bodies. I’ve been leading them away from where I let the hetman go, drawing them into the deeper desert, back toward the lost land they came from.

I’ve done this many times before, and this won’t be the last time.

I fight and I run, never letting them surround me.

It’s a dance.One that never ends.

Their hunger is palpable. I’ve killed so many of them, but there’s always more.

I try not to think of their endless numbers. To think too much about that would sap my will to fight, and I can’t let that happen. Not while there’s still people in the world above I care about.

Like the sun, their names and faces are drifting further away from me.

But I know they’re still above me. I go there sometimes, just to remember what it feels like to see the sky above me. Or to breathe air that isn’t wet with the bitter flavor of somewhere terrible and utterly hostile. It’s been a long time since I ventured to the surface. The longer I spend there, the more I feel its air start to burn me. I’m afraid I’m becoming more used to the darkness, that the sunlit world above doesn’t want me anymore.

I remember when I met a girl up there.

She was young, like I was once, and she didn’t hate me. She saw what I was and she didn’t run in terror like most people do. She saw who I used to be, but that’s not what most people see.

They see the suit, and feel its primal urge to unmake them simmering behind my eyes.

They can’t help it, and I don’t hate them for it, but it hurts.

It hurts to know I used to be just like them, and now…

Now I don’t know what I am.

But for all that I’ve changed and become something they hate and fear, I’m still holding on to what makes me human. If I can just hold on to the part of me that was a little girl once, I can turn the awful things that have happened to me into something good, something noble.

But I can feel it slipping away.

What will I be when I can’t remember her?

A change comes over the Void creatures.

I sense it almost immediately, a turn in their purpose. It’s hard to know what changes, but it’s clear that their pursuit of me has shifted, like they don’t care about me anymore.

Like they have better target for their ferocious urge to destroy.

A terrible suspicion fills me, and I surge away from the creatures behind me.

My armor makes me faster than them, and I move through the tunnels like a ghost, taking the crooked paths that only I know about. I feel the ferocity of the chase fade as I circle around, climbing back to the surface and feeling the hot tension of the world above.

I’d been trying to keep the monsters close to me, trying to lure them away from the settlements on the surface, but when I emerge into the sunlight through a hidden cleft at the top of a solitary spire of bare rock, I see how horribly wrong I’ve been.

I thought I was leading the monsters away, truly I did.

A giant skull has been set upon a boulder atop the spire, a marker of sorts.

It’s a warning. A sign that these lands are not safe.

I know that’s what it is, because I put it here.

One foot on the skull, I look down at a settlement full of people.

My helm unfolds from over my face, and I see with my own eyes.

Beneath me are neat and ordered streets, running between finely made buildings of sun-baked bricks. At the settlement’s southern end are the silken awnings of a bustling market, and I see a disc of gold on the roof of what I think is a temple. The sounds of laughter drift up to me on the spire.

I smell roasting meat, animal dung, and the heady aroma of spices.

They are the smells of life, the everyday texture of the world above.

For a second I’m transported back to my half-forgotten youth, and the corners of my mouth curl in what might be a smile.

Then I remember what lurks beneath the sands, and the half-formed smile falls from my face.

My heart pounds in my chest and I fight to draw breath.

Don’t they know the danger they’re in?

The inner surfaces of my armor clamp down hard on my flesh, and I sink to one knee with the pain of it. It’s hungry to feed, and I wonder how much of my path has been chosen by me, how much by its design.

My senses are finely tuned to the denizens of the Void.

They’re close, so very close, and rising to the surface. Somewhere out in the desert.

I feel the imminence of a breach like the pressure in the air before a storm.

The mask slams back into place, filling my vision with patterns of light and heat.

I look back to the settlement as I hear the clash of steel, and a shouting voice.

My gaze drifts to a martial field set at the settlement’s edge, where scores of armed men and women are lined up. I watch them, confused as to what they’re doing until it hits me.

They’re training to fight.

A man is shouting at them, filling their hearts with courage and their souls with fire.

I can’t hear his words, but I can see his face as clearly as if he were standing right next to me.

It’s the hetman I dragged below the earth.

I vault from rock to rock as I make my way down to the settlement.

The nearness of the Void creatures is a building pressure in my skull.

It won’t be long before they’re here.

I leap through an animal enclosure, scattering the livestock as they catch my scent, and panic.

The people of the settlement don’t notice me at first. Then I hear the cries of alarm spread as they see my armored form in their midst. I’m heading straight for the hetman, and I already feel anger pounding in my veins.

I showed him! Why didn’t he listen? I took him to see the horrors below. I wanted him to feel the terror of their very existence and to carry that terror back to his people.

But all I’ve done is strengthened his resolve to stand and fight.

Every person that dies here will be my fault. Their blood will be on my hands.

I wanted to prevent this, but I’ve made their deaths inevitable.

Men and women scatter before me, terrified despite the weapons they carry. The hetman’s face hardens. The last time I saw him, he was terrified, but his terror has turned to hate.

His eyes tell me he thinks I’m here to kill him, and maybe I am.

My mask snaps open as I come to a halt before him.

“Why are you still here?” I scream, tasting the hot desert air. Underneath the smells of the settlement, I feel the growing presence of the Void. It’s like biting on a copper coin. “Go!”

“Back, demon!” he snarls. “You are a herald of the beasts!”

For a moment, his meaning is lost on me. Then I understand.

“You think I bring the monsters…?”

“I know you,” he spits, advancing on me. “You are the Void’s daughter. Wherever you walk, the monsters follow.”

I shake my head, ready to throw his accusation back in his face…

Then I wonder if he’s right.

I fight the Voidborn wherever I can, wherever I find them.

I hold my hand up before me, seeing the hair-fine threads of violet light shimmering in the sculpted plates of my armor. Until now, I have always thought it was part of me, that I controlled it, but what if my control isn’t so complete as I thought? I assert my will, and the veins of light fade.

Is it possible? Are the creatures of the Void drawn to me?

No, I would know. I’d know if I was somehow drawing them deeper into the world.

My doubt turns to anger, and the blades of light brighten around my hands.

“I escaped you once before,” said the hetman, raising his sword. “And we will fight the beasts you command.”

“You escaped me?” I say, incredulous. “Is that what you think happened?”

He swings his sword, but I block it easily. He’s not skilled with a blade, and it’s easy for me to dodge his attacks. I circle him as he swings again and again. The townsfolk are gathered around me, screaming at their leader to strike a deathblow. My armor responds to his every attack and their aggression, filling my body with the urge to fight, to kill.

They see the second skin I wear, but they don’t realize how much danger they’re in right now.

Not from the Void. From me.

They can’t see the girl beneath. They don’t want to see her.

It’s easier for them to believe I’m a monster.

I feel anger and betrayal harden my heart to them. Why should I fight to save them? Why do I fight to hold on to my humanity, when it hurts so much to remember all I’ve lost?

Why not just become the monster they think I am?

Wouldn’t that be easier?

But then I look beyond the hetman’s angry face, to the grandparents watching from the doorways of the homes they built with their own two hands. To the young mothers clutching newborns to their breasts. And beyond even them, to the thousand daily displays of love and the small acts of kindness that go unnoticed every day in the world.

That’s why I fight the monsters.

I stand for the people who cannot stand, because there’s no one who fights quite like me.

Because if I don’t stand for them, who will?

And what will be left of the girl who came back if I don’t?

But every war requires sacrifice. I’ve made so many already—now I know I need to make yet another. This time it won’t be me that pays the blood price, but I’ll carry it all the same.

I turn a full circle. Everyone is looking to the hetman. He’s their strength, the only reason they’re still here. He’s filled their hearts with courage and the will to fight an enemy that can’t be fought, can’t be bargained with, and which only gets stronger with every life it consumes.

There’s only one way to end this without everybody dying.

I block yet another clumsy swing, and as his sword goes wide, I spin inside his guard to hammer my light-bladed fists against his chest.

Searing energy pours into him, filling his body with light. His every vein, nerve ending, and bone burns with searing brilliance for an instant before his body explodes.

It’s awful, but I can’t stop now. I feel the nearness of the Void as a terrible, twisting pain in my gut. The texture of the air abruptly changes, and I know the Void has climbed to the world above.

It’s on the surface and it’s coming here now.

I turn away from the molten, disintegrating ruin of the hetman as his body falls to the sand, barely recognizable as something that was once human. People scatter in terror as my shoulder pods slide up and fill with killing light. I feel the fiery pressure build within me, aching for release.

I unleash a salvo of spiraling light, blasting a deserted grain store to blazing rubble. Burning seeds and baskets spill from the ruins. I obliterate the market with more flashing bolts, and the silk awnings rise up like the burning sails of a sand-clipper as they catch light.

Purple-white fire streaks through the settlement and explodes with devastating force. People run screaming as I destroy their homes. They think I’m trying to kill them, that I’m doing this because I’ve become something monstrous, but that’s just not true.

I only destroy buildings my helm’s vision shows me are empty.

I demolish unmanned walls and barricades—anything that might give them hope they have a chance against the Void.

I’m not trying to kill them. I just want them to run.

Night has fallen as I watch from the spire of rock above the burning settlement, one foot braced on the skull I left as a warning marker. The horde of Voidborn climbs toward me in a rush of snapping fangs, misshapen limbs, and inhuman forms.

It sounds like a swarm of voracious insects devouring a harvest crop.

There’s too many to count, almost no way to tell where one beast ends and the next begins. It’s just a mass of teeth and claws. Unbridled destruction given form.

They sense my presence here, and I make no attempt to run.

Because if they’re coming for me, they’re not going after the people of the settlement.

The horizon burns with a sick light that doesn’t belong in this world, and forking traceries of vivid, purple lightning flash up from the sundered ground deep in the desert.

The settlement’s inhabitants have long since fled, leading their animals behind colorful wagons bearing what possessions they couldn’t bear to leave behind. They’re already many miles west, moving in a long column like the dormun-riders of old.

They’ll follow the sand roads to the new-flowing waters, moving on until they can begin again.

And that’s the point. To begin again they need to be alive.

I remember their faces as they looked back at their lost homes. They pointed to me high up on the spire, and cursed me. The memory of their faces still pains me. So full of fear and hatred.

They’ll carry that hate with them, telling stories of the forsaken girl who isn’t a girl anymore. They’ll tell how she killed their heroic leader before destroying their homes. The tale will grow in the telling, as Shuriman tales are wont to do, until I’ll be known as a heartless murderer, a killer of women and children.

The carapace slides back across my face as the first of the monsters scramble onto the ledge. Violet fire sheathes my hands. I feel the familiar rush of excitement as my body fills with heat.

If this is what I need to be to keep my people alive, then so be it.

That’s a burden I’m willing to bear.

I’ll be their monster.

Meir follows a crowd of cultists out of the prophet’s tent city, and down into a low valley at the edge of the desert. He is unsure if this was the right decision; beyond the outcropping of rock where tonight’s sermon will be held is a… he’s not sure how to describe it other than hole, descending deep beneath the Shuriman sands and into an emptiness that is both growing and alive.

Throughout the day, these cultists throw livestock into the hole. They throw each other into the hole. Sometimes they throw themselves into the hole.

And, from what Meir is told, the hole responds by growing steadily larger, so more cultists can throw more animals and more people down into it, and it can keep growing, and the awful pattern can repeat itself until the hole is so large that something big falls in. A city, maybe.

“Like Nashramae,” he mutters—though even if the entire state toppled in, ports and all, it would barely graze the sides.

He caught a glimpse of the hole earlier. It’s too big to be real, and yet...

No one knows this is here, thinks Meir, but he’s smart enough to keep this to himself.

He cannot risk these people turning on him, although he uses the word ‘people’ lightly. Some of them have a deep lavender glint behind the eyes that seems to spread over their faces in veiny, twisting patterns, and they mutter constantly about Icathia... or something called the Void.

He cannot go back home. He’s not even sure if his home still exists. Yet he cannot flee anywhere but further south, where the land turns grey and things named after old storybook monsters squirm across the rocks.

Meir must keep running. If he stops, Noxus will find him—and because he struck an officer, they will kill him.

“Have you come to see the prophet?” one man asks him, as the crowds shuffle into an open area similar to a theater stage. His skin shifts sickeningly beneath a tattered cloak. Meir sees some of the man’s teeth moving inside his mouth.

“Yes,” Meir replies, knowing the cultists won’t let him through without hearing one of their sermons.

The man laughs. “You are new! New to the nameless city, like many others. Some seek the prophet. Others seek nothing. It is all the same.” He motions to his face, which glows faintly in the night air. “Do not be worried, my friend. Soon, soon, you will understand. The prophet will show you.”

The evening stars, black and yawning and somehow closer than before, wink ominously above the crowd’s makeshift lanterns. Beyond this light there is the desert. Beyond that is the hole.

And on the other side of the hole? Freedom. Meir can almost taste it.

Shurima is being swallowed up from three sides: in the north, Noxus spreads along the coast like a cancer, claiming everything from vast city-states to farming settlements of a dozen souls. In the ancient capital, the long-dead, now supposedly-living-again Emperor Azir is said to prepare for an inevitable war. And in the southeast... well…

This is the southeast. These people are eating it.

There has to be something beyond the hole. Down along the grey, lifeless coast, at the southernmost tip of the Icathian peninsula. A smuggler’s port, or maybe a stopoff for fishing ships from Bilgewater? Meir could catch a boat, start over again in the Serpent Isles, and then—

“Stop thinking,” threatens the broken-faced man. Meir looks up and sees a dozen pairs of shattered, glowing eyes looking back at him. “Your thoughts are loud. Be silent.”

The man points to the outcropping, now the pulpit of an emaciated figure.

“Malzahar has come.”

The prophet is covered in scarves and cloaks crudely marked with the symbols of old Icathia. His feet are bare; his hands seemingly frozen in a rigormortis grip, as though he were trying to fend off some kind of monstrous creature. His face is obscured by a long violet wrap, and his head...

Meir feels something like a drill being driven into his brain. He had looked for maybe a half-second into the prophet’s face, and seen within his forehead something... shifting? No, that can’t be right. Malzahar's entire skull was thin, fleshy webbing, with something... horrible inside. A light within a light, pulsating outward. Spreading. Hungry.

“My children,” says Malzahar, though his voice is not a voice at all. It’s a projection inside of Meir’s thoughts, an extension of the prophet's un-light that is slick, glistening, and wrong.

Meir has to get out of here, but he can’t run. The cultists are packed in too tightly, and he’d never make it around the great hole before they caught him, and tossed him down.

“Tonight is a night of confession.”

Now it’s too late. Malzahar sees Meir; Meir is not sure how, but amid the crowd of hundreds the prophet’s gaze rips through him, holding his body in place. Meir cannot even let out a whimper.

“Ah, a newcomer,” says Malzahar. “Then let this be your awakening.”

There are flashes within Meir’s mind. An enormous shape, looming behind the prophet and filling the entire night sky. Buildings... or something like buildings, but inverted and crooked beneath a vast, unnatural ocean. Thousands of voracious creatures swimming in schools so large they block even the dappled light from the not-sun, creating their own currents in the not-water.

And... a name...

A name that dances across the grooves of his brain like an acrobat, elusive but on the edge of realization.

“Believers,” Malzahar continues. “I have always told you that the end is certain. The Void will come, and wash away the world and all its miseries. And with it, each and every one of you.”

Meir’s mind is ripping itself apart. Thoughts snap in and out so quickly he can barely track what he’s experiencing. Wings. Spiders the size of wolves. A figure floating beneath Shurima, a confrontation. He sees Noxus consumed by an impossible wave of creatures, the Immortal Bastion cracking grotesquely before falling into their mass. Ice breaking, things tumbling upwards and out.

He sees Malzahar again, shadowed by a shape too large, why is it so large, why is she—

...She?

“But we are all changed by our experiences, are we not? I watched my parents die in Amakra. Waste away to illness. Yet they are not gone. Their memories serve a purpose, and the imprint they left on me made me what I am, and what I am made you.”

The shape looms larger. It’s not physical, no, but Meir’s mind holds desperately onto anything it can, something to anchor itself and escape the prophet’s suffocating weight.

“The Void has tasted these memories. And it wants more.”

The cultists throw their arms upwards, and the stars wink closer than ever before. Meir must hold on. Freedom is just beyond the chasm, he tries to think.

But the words drain from his mind.

Before him, before them all, is Malzahar. There is nothing else.

“The Void has embraced a new form. A new... possibility. I once saw the world end in the absence of light and darkness, the totality of nothing. And that was wrong. So tonight, to you, to all my children, I confess—the Void has spoken. And now, beneath her sea of lavender, she wants. You, your memories, your experiences, existence. She wants everything.”

Meir only begins to run when the ground gives way under his feet. The chasm’s sudden expansion swallows them all—the tent city, the cultists, everything—as Malzahar floats above, watching them all pour down into the throbbing, animated nothing.

“And,” the prophet concludes, “she will have it.”

Some of the cultists freeze midair, darkly luminous corals bursting from their skin before they are sucked into the undulating walls of the hole. More are torn limb from limb by fast moving schools of strange, iridescent fish. Others loose a scream before vanishing completely, as though suddenly erased.

Meir’s memories, like the stars above, wink out one by one as he falls faster and faster. The Noxian invasion, his hand striking an officer, his family, his friends, his childhood, his dreams. He drifts down beneath the lavender sea, past strange, inverted buildings jutting awkwardly from the light-dappled nothingness beyond the Void’s hideous living sky, and he catches a glimpse of something massive on the verge of being born.

As his memories fade, the shape seems to move, responding to this new source of sustenance—growing stronger as Meir, the cultists, the animals, the tents, as they all fade away, erased utterly from the gentle shores of reality, repurposed into something terrible and new.

A man once named Meir closes his eyes, emptied of all things.

He touches the bottom of the Void.

And then he is gone.

Kassadin started life as a lowly offcast, walking the harsh sands of the Great Sai alongside merchant caravans to draw predators away from their more valuable goods. He survived many of these treks across the desert, and began to serve less as bait, and more as a guide.

The foreign tongues that sought his talents, “Kas sai a dyn?” or “whom does the desert know?” often slurred their Shuriman, and so he became fondly known as Kassadin in the back alleys and markets of Bel’zhun. He spent many years exploring the ancient ruins of his homeland, making his employers exceedingly wealthy, but it wasn’t until a dig near Zirima that he found a treasure of his own—he fell in love with a woman from one of the desert tribes.

With his wife and newborn daughter, Kassadin settled in a small village in the rocky canyons to the south. He was on the road often, his work sometimes requiring him to accompany particularly valuable relics to some faraway sponsor. But, no matter where his travels took him, Kassadin would always return with exciting tales from the world beyond.

Journeying home from distant Piltover, Kassadin and his fellow caravaneers were watering their beasts at an oasis when they encountered the first terrified survivors stumbling out of the desert. They spoke of the disaster that had claimed their homes, as if the maw of the underworld itself had opened up to devour them. They had barely escaped with their lives.

Fearing for his own family’s safety, Kassadin left the others behind, riding hard, driving his mount almost to exhaustion. When he finally reached the place where his village had once stood, he found only shifting sand and rubble. He clawed at the debris until his hands bled, screaming out his wife and daughter’s names, though no answer came. Days later, Kassadin’s companions caught up to him, now just a broken and empty man weeping beneath the scorching sun.

They dragged him back to Zirima, but Kassadin would go no further. For years, he tried to drown his grief, reduced to little more than a vagrant… until word reached town of “the Prophet.”

Whispers of unspeakable horrors that dwelt beneath the earth, and of sacrifices made in their name, chilled Kassadin to the bone. He knew well the legends of old Icathia, and the fate that befell that accursed place—if the Void had been deliberately drawn toward Shurima once more, then it had likely been the death of his entire village, and countless more besides. He also knew there were few, if any, who could stand against it.

In that moment, Kassadin swore that he would avenge his wife and daughter, by destroying this insidious Prophet, and the source of his abyssal power. He was a man who had made his living by finding safe paths through the most dangerous places, and resolved to arm himself with the most arcane and esoteric weapons ever known in Valoran, fused with Zaunite ingenuity, and blessed by Ionian spirit-healers. He called in every favor he could, from scholars of antiquities to common smugglers, for their help in… acquiring what he sought. Many called him a madman, believing this the last time they would ever see their old friend alive—Kassadin merely thanked them for their concern, and bid them farewell. He would face the Void alone.

Last of all, he stole the infamous Nether Blade of Horok, the sword that had slain a thousand deceivers in the latter days of the empire. He could feel the cold pull of oblivion in its edge, but no longer had any regard for his own mortality, and nothing of his old life left to lose.

Disguised in the robes of a pilgrim, more than a decade since he had last set foot anywhere near that desolate land, Kassadin made his way into Icathia. He would go where no man was ever meant to walk.

He would have his vengeance, even if it killed him.

Shurima is dying. I do not think she will rise again.

The emptiness that writhes in the very bones of my homeland is a malignant, unspeakable thing. It spreads. It devours. Its merest touch is death. A thousand deaths—a thousand, times a thousand, times a thousand. Perhaps once there were some who could stand against it and hope to prevail, but no longer.

I walk here, alone, in the darkest places beneath the world, and I see it with my own eyes, through the finely crafted lenses of my helm. What is seen cannot be unseen, and what is known cannot be forgotten. Not here. I am weary, so very weary.

Still, I walk.

I can no longer feel the ground beneath me, nor the bare rock of the cavern walls, but so, too, am I spared the worst of the numbing winds that rise from the depths. I give thanks for that, for truly this is a chill beyond the desert’s night. I have sat upon the endless plain of the Sai Faraj beneath the first moon of winter, and yet never known anything like this. It is the deep cold of the Void, which the ancients—in their ignorance—might have named as their underworld, and the source of all evil in the mortal realm.

The truth is worse, I think. The air itself feels wrong, and unnatural, throbbing with a fierce, purple un-light that pains the mind.

And from the shadows that even my eyes cannot pierce, you come.

Three. Four. Maybe five. It is difficult to say. A hundred and more of your kind have I faced, and slain. Your howls echo in the gloom, but I do not fear you, for you have already taken everything I ever had.

My wife; my beloved. My daughter; our binsikhi, our little explorer. I call out their names, as I always do, to remind myself why it is that I fight. Then I raise my gauntlet.

For all your teeth and your claws and your ravenous rage, you cannot defeat me. Either I will strike you down, back to the pit… or you will send me into the hereafter, and I will finally be at peace. I will be with them once more.

Either way, I will win. No, you cannot defeat me, you who are shayatin, the beasts of the last infinity…

In my other hand, I clutch the stone tightly. Its foreign magic has kept me alive this long—long enough to delve far, far beneath the wastelands of old Icathia. It holds your corruption at bay, though at what cost to my flesh and my spirit, I cannot guess, for this smallest of trinkets now thrums in time with my own heart. That fearful rhythm is not the pulse of life, or magic, or any other wholesome thing, but of oblivion itself. Of that much, I am certain.

Back, beast. Stay back.

The Nether Blade snaps out from my gauntleted wrist, into the air between us.

Yes. Yes, you know this weapon, don’t you. You all remember it.

Where only moments ago you hungered for my flesh, now you are wary. Now you hesitate. You circle. Those of you that have eyes cannot take them from the blade’s shimmering edge. Even you must know, I think, that this thing was not made for mortal hands, or mortal souls. It was made by clever magic, by men who were no longer men, and who now are nothing at all. Would you remember them too, I wonder?

You screech and hiss, and stamp at the uneven ground. It would be easy to imagine that you hate all living things—but you do not hate us, I think. Not truly. You do not know what hate is.

Hate is the fire that burned in the immortal hearts of the god-warriors when they saw your kind spilling out into the world. Hate was what drove them against you, again and again, though they knew it would almost certainly be their doom…

Yes, this weapon remembers you. It remembers how to end you.

Horok, it was, that struck the first telling blow against your masters. Great and mighty Horok of the Ascended Host, whose name shall live forever. He is the Finder of Hidden Ways, and the One Who Follows After. It was Horok who first dared to face you down here, in the darkness, away from the light of the sun that had given him his strength. It was Horok who first bore the Nether Blade unto the Void’s vile heart.

And it was Horok who showed his brothers and sisters how to defeat the abyss.

I am no Ascended hero of Shurima, no god-warrior to be remembered in the grand halls of that ruined empire. I am but a man. I am a grieving father, and a child of the sai in my own time. From the dust I came, and to the dust I shall return soon enough.

But not yet. For now, I walk as Horok once walked, and I do this with his blade held out before—

The closest of you lunges. Horned shell and razor-sharp talons graze my side as I twist away, breath rasping through the pipes in my mask. For a moment I am blind, trapped inside this meager armored suit of my own devising.

Then I bring the Nether Blade up sharply, cleaving through what on any other creature could be called a neck.

The sinuous body crashes down, and I feel the weapon’s aching hunger in my sword arm, in the sourness at the back of my tongue, like the aftertaste of a scream. Who will be next? Which of you will try?

The desert knows Horok. His name shall live forever. Even when he was betrayed by the tyrant Ne’Zuk, to his death, none would claim the bladed gauntlet from Horok’s wrist. As far as the god-warriors had fallen, even they could not deny that these lands might be threatened by the Voidborn once again, in some unseen future, and this great weapon should be ready.

This is my land. Such horrors walk here now, openly, and I cannot allow it. I will plunge this blade into the creeping nothingness beneath Shurima, as I have a dozen times before.

Was it destiny? No. Nothing so noble as destiny. It was fated, I think, that I knew where this thing might be found. I led the echnebi treasure-seekers to Horok’s mausoleum on the banks of the Kahleek many years ago—back then I sought nothing more than their Piltovan gold, so that I might provide for my family. I gladly helped break open the tomb that had remained sealed for thousands of years. The Nether Blade was not the prize the echnebi sought, but they deemed it valuable all the same.

Some in the tribes called me mercenary. Some called me a traitor. All I know is, in the strange days since then, Horok’s mausoleum has been utterly consumed by the enemy. Were it not for those treasure-seekers and the bounty they paid me, this weapon would now be lost. Like my people. My family.

Unlike them, when the time came, the blade was something I could find again.

Kas sai a dyn. Whom does the desert know?

The desert does not know you, beast. You are not welcome here. You are lost in this ancient land of gods and men.

But the desert knows my name, for that is my name.

Not once have I lost my way. I know exactly where I am, and how many more paces it would be to the doom of all things. I will atone for what I have done, and that which I have not.

And I will defy you until the end.

Whether mistaken for a demon or god, many tales have been told of the Darkin Blade... but few know his real name, or the story of his fall.

In ancient times, long before desert sands swallowed the empire, a mighty champion of Shurima was brought before the Sun Disc to become the avatar for a now forgotten celestial ideal. Remade as one of the Ascended, his wings were the golden light of dawn, and his armor sparkled like a constellation of hope from beyond the great veil.

Aatrox was his name. He was at the vanguard of every noble conflict. So true and just was his conduct that other god-warriors would always gather at his side, and ten thousand mortals of Shurima marched behind him. When Setaka, the Ascended warrior-queen, called for his help against the rebellion of Icathia, Aatrox answered without hesitation.

But no one predicted the extent of the horrors that the rebels would unleash—the Void quickly overwhelmed its Icathian masters, and began the grinding annihilation of all life it encountered.

After many years of desperate battle, Aatrox and his brethren finally halted the Void’s perverse advance, and seared the largest rifts shut. But the surviving Ascended, the self-described Sunborn, had been forever changed by what they had encountered. Though Shurima had triumphed, they all had lost something in their victory... even noble Aatrox.

And in time, Shurima fell, as all empires must.

Without any monarch to defend, or the existential threat of the Void to test them, Aatrox and the Sunborn began to clash with one another, and eventually this became a war for the ruins of their world. Mortals fleeing the conflict came to know them instead by a new and scornful name: the darkin.

Fearing that these fallen Ascended were as dangerous to Runeterra’s survival as the Void incursions had been, the Targonians intervened. It is said that the Aspect of Twilight gave mortals the knowledge to trap the darkin, and the newly reborn Aspect of War united many in fighting back against them. Never fearing any foe, Aatrox and his armies were ready, and he realized only too late that they had been deceived. A force greater than a thousand dead suns pulled him inside the sword he had carried into battle countless times, and forever bound his immortal essence to it.

The weapon was a prison, sealing his consciousness in suffocating, eternal darkness, robbing him even of the ability to die. For centuries, he strained against this hellish confinement... until some nameless mortal was foolish enough to try and wield the blade once more. Aatrox seized upon this opportunity, forcing his will and an imitation of his original form onto his bearer, though the process quickly drained all life from the new body.

In the years that followed, Aatrox groomed many more hosts—men and women of exceptional vitality or fortitude. Though his grasp of such magics had been limited in life, he learned to take control of a mortal in the span of single breath, and in battle he discovered he could feast on his victims to build himself ever larger and stronger.

Aatrox traveled the land, searching desperately, endlessly, for a way return to his previous Ascended form… but the riddle of the blade proved unsolvable, and in time he realized he would never be free of it. The flesh he stole and crudely shaped began to feel like a mockery of his former glory—a cage only slightly larger than the sword. Despair and loathing grew in his heart. The heavenly powers that Aatrox had once embodied had been wiped from the world, and all memory.

Raging against this injustice, he arrived at a solution that could only be born of a prisoner’s desperation. If he could not destroy the blade or free himself, then he would embrace oblivion instead.

Now, Aatrox marches toward this merciless goal, bringing war and death wherever he goes. He clings to a blind hope: if he can drive all of creation into a final, apocalyptic battle—where everything, everything else is destroyed—then maybe he and the blade will also cease to exist.