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“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.

There is a place between dimensions, between worlds. To some it is known as the Outside, to others it is the Unknown. To those that truly know, however, it is called the Void. Despite its name, the Void is not an empty place, but rather the home of unspeakable things - horrors not meant for minds of men. Cho'Gath is a creature born of the Void, a thing whose true nature is so awful most will not speak its name. Its fellows have been poking at the walls that divide dimensions for a crack, a way into Runeterra, where they can visit their own personal paradise of horror upon the world. They are called the Voidborn, creatures so ancient and terrible that they have been removed from history altogether. It is rumored that the Voidborn command vast armies of unspeakable creatures on other worlds, that they were once driven from Runeterra by powerful magic lost to antiquity.

If such tales are true, then the rumors that follow must be equally true - that one day, the Voidborn will return. Even now, something dark stirs in Icathia. Cho'Gath, an alien creature of malice and violence, causes all but the most stalwart to cringe in fear. Cho'Gath even appears to feed on its predations, growing and swelling as it gorges itself. Worse yet, the creature is intelligent, perhaps greatly so, hinting at the sentient horror of the Void.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For more than two millennia, Shurima dominated the known world—an empire that reigned over countless peoples without challenge, and without threat.

Until the day Icathia fell.

From the moment the Void tore its way into the material realm, the armies of Shurima faced an enemy that could not only lay their grand empire low, but one that seemed to grow stronger the more they fought it. The corruption spread rapidly from Icathia’s ruins, boiling over the land and beneath the oceans, before its hideous tendrils reached the southernmost jungles of Ixtal.

Ne’Zuk of the Ascended Host was an Ixtali elemental mage of colossal power, and almost unrivaled arrogance. He went before the emperor, pledging to create a weapon powerful enough to take the fight to the Void, and eradicate it at the source of its original eruption.

After months of inhuman labor, Ne’Zuk revealed the Monolith—a floating fortress of living stone, maintained by the greatest elemental mages, and its ramparts manned by his fellow Ixtali god-warriors. The size of a city itself, the Monolith glided titanically toward the wastelands of Icathia, the lightning crackling from its magical inhibitors fusing the sands to glass beneath it. Ne’Zuk and his superweapon arrived at their destination, to face once more the howling infinite darkness of the abyssal realm, and the hordes of Voidborn monstrosities it had created.

The battle dragged into weeks. It was violence of a scale and intensity never before witnessed in Runeterra. Sorcery enough to raze entire civilizations, or render whole continents into naught but a memory, was unleashed upon the Void.

The darkness retaliated in kind. Its hideous energies gouged deep wounds into the living stone of the Monolith, whose surfaces became pocked and seared with unnatural malphite—from the Ixtali for “bad stone”—and leaving mineral-like scars. The fortress was pushed to the very limits of its design, struggling to self-repair and reknit its weakened superstructure… but even the incredible magics that held it aloft had a breaking point.

As Ne’Zuk fought to rally his Ascended brethren for one last, desperate charge, the unthinkable happened. Sagging for an instant, the Monolith crashed down to earth, cleaving through the bedrock of Icathia and opening the Void beneath to the skies.

Much of the fortress was lost within that gaping maw, vanishing into the silent nothingness beyond. The rest rained down as great ruins, littering a landscape already blackened by the terrible conflict that had been cut so abruptly short. Only a single Ascended survived—Ne’Zuk hauled himself from the wreckage, choking on the ashes of what was meant to be his grandest triumph, now his greatest folly, and fled for his life.

In defiance of all worldly reason, some disparate fragments of the Monolith endured, still imbued with something like magical life. The far-flung shards struggled to heal, to reform the whole to which they had once belonged. But the Void’s endless hunger leached away at them, rendering them as little more than inert shapes clawing feebly in the dust.

However, against all that had been lost, a single shard remained.

Buried deep beneath the surface, forgotten even by those that dwelt in the abyss, it slowly gathered in strength. It lived, until at last it awakened after uncounted centuries, and realized it was alone.

In all the centuries since that dark day, Malphite, the last shard of the Monolith, has become something of a legend in Runeterra. It has reputedly been sighted everywhere, from Targon to Zaun; heard sometimes as a tectonic roar in the deepest caverns, and sometimes as a quiet voice, humming to itself, that it might still remember the sounds of the world it once knew.

Despite the enormous span of its existence, the overwhelming drive enkindled by Ne’Zuk’s creation of the Monolith has not wavered. Now, Malphite knows it must soon rise to meet the resurgent darkness it once battled, as the Void awakens to threaten all of Runeterra once more.

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.

“Listen to me,” I tell the little girl who found me here, beside the pit. “I need you to hear me. There isn’t much time.”

She leans forward, without a hint of fear in her eyes. “Tell me what to do.”

I like her. A slight smile breaks across my face, for the first time in what seems like… forever. “Not this,” I say, gesturing to the arrow gripped in her hand. She holds it like a spear.

I was only a child when the Void took me from my family, so I didn’t know any better either. But the rest of them, they were so careless. Sacrifices, offerings, tributes—whatever you want to call them, they were never going to work. It isn’t some god, appeased by gifts and prayers. It just wants to devour everything.

“You want to kill it? You want to destroy it?” I ask her.

She nods.

“Then starve it.”

The sensation of needles on my flesh grows stronger, as if in response to these words. The threatening presence is closing in around us, and my second skin constricts, pulling taut as a bow. I take one last deep breath before they come.

The sand begins to shift, puckering and falling away, like in an hourglass. Eerie pulses of light filter into the sky, as the construct-creatures heave themselves up into the Shuriman night, screeching and drooling. I steady myself, charging the energy inside my shoulder pods.

I grit my teeth, and release it.

Bright blooms of heat and pain find their targets quickly, raining down, stopping the creatures in their tracks, flinging them aside. The air is filled with an acid reek, and the hiss of melting chitin.

Soon there is nothing left of them. I wait for the needles’ itch to stop, but it doesn’t.

The girl is crouched beside me, ready. She probably cannot understand what she is seeing.

“Does it hurt?” she whispers, her hand reaching out for the glowing scales on my arm.

I pull back reflexively. She doesn’t even flinch.

“Sometimes,” I confess.

Not too far away, her village sleeps on unaware, for the most part. Curiosity had no doubt gotten the better of this little girl. So many stories, fables both frightening and fantastical. The voidling beasts hunting in the dead of night, calling to one another.

She just wanted to see for herself. See what lurks beyond the rocks, see the thing her people both fear and adore at the same time.

My skin tightens again. The needles, the constant itch…

I blink. “I’m sorry, you didn’t tell me your name.”

She stands up proudly, still brandishing the arrow. “I’m Illi. I came to protect my family from the monster.” She is no more than ten years of age.

“Well, Illi—sometimes running is the best thing to do.”

“But you don’t run,” she says, narrowing her eyes, “do you?”

A clever one, this girl. I shake my head. “Not anymore.”

“Then I won’t either!” Illi proclaims. Brave as well.

She has no idea what they’re dealing with. None of them do. All these things her people have done to rid themselves of the creatures, they were just ringing the dinner bell.

“You need to tell them, Illi. You need to make them understand. No more dancing beneath the new moon. And no more animals tied to stakes. The Void has no mercy to offer—it feeds or it dies.”

The day I came to understand this, was when I knew I had a chance. Maybe that’s why I survive, while so many others perish.

But survival always has its price. Ever since I found my way back, I’ve been paying it.

“Look…” the girl whispers. “They are coming to find us.”

I don’t have to look. I knew they would come. By instinct, the carapace draws over my face. Illi stares up at me.

“Don’t be frightened,” I say to her in a voice now so twisted and monstrous, it could have the opposite meaning.

“Of what?” she asks. I find myself wearing a smile she cannot see.

There are only a handful of people who’ve ever seen me in the flesh, or whatever it is that now covers my body. All but two of them are dead.

Illi’s people appear to be capable hunters. Only the capable live out here. I can see where she got her bravery. Their torches twinkle in the night.

“Papa!” she calls out to the searching villagers, without warning me. “I found her! The girl who came back!”

They’re heading toward us now, weapons at the ready, fire in their eyes. “Illi!” her father yells, nocking an arrow to his bow. “Get away from that... thing!”

She looks up at me again, confused. For every little girl like Illi, there are ten others who would run the other way. Or worse. I know what most people say about me. I’ve seen their fear scrawled across mud walls, scratched into the canyon rocks.

Beware the girl who came back a monster.

They don’t know a thing about me. To them, I’m just something they do not want to face—a living, walking, fighting embodiment of what they fear most. I guess that’s why they added the mark to my name.

Ten years ago, I was only Kaisa—very much like Illi, hopeful about a future as limitless as the stars in the night sky. That future died the day the Void dragged me down.

The needles are back. Illi releases my hand just as my luminous weapons materialize over my arms. “Go to him,” I tell her. “Go to your father.”

“Illi, run!” her father pleads. He draws back his bowstring with trembling hands.

“No!” she yells, turning to me. “I don’t run anymore.”

I usher her forwards, keeping my eyes trained on the villagers. “No, Illi, you were born a fighter. They will need you.”

After a few steps, she turns back. “What do I tell them?”

“Tell them... Tell them to be ready.”

The Void has taken so much from me, but I refuse to let it take everything. These moments, where kindness and humanity shine through, where innocence and trust extinguish fear—they fill me with hope that we can defeat the rivers of timeless poison that flow beneath the world.

The first time I escaped the abyss, I did it for myself.

Maybe one day, it will be for them.

The darkin are thrice-cursed—once by the ancient enemy they faced, again by the fall of their glorious empire, and finally by the betrayal that has damned them for all eternity.

When the rebels of Icathia foolishly unleashed the Void in battle, Shurima’s defense was led, as ever, by the legendary Ascended. Imbued with the power of the Sun Disc, these “god-warriors” towered over mortal soldiers, wielding magic and blade with equal ease, and eventually they were victorious. Even so, the horrors of the war took a heavy toll, and those who lived to remember it were perhaps never quite as they once were.

Centuries later, with the loss of mighty Azir at the very moment of his own Ascension, Shurima fell. Although apparently immortal, the god-warriors had been born human—gradually, with no emperor to lead them, many of the surviving Ascended began to falter in purpose as their older, petty ambitions resurfaced. They taught themselves forbidden sorceries, and came to view themselves as the rightful inheritors of the world. The scattered mortal populace named these new tyrants darkin, a whispered curse translating roughly in the old tongue as “the fallen.”

But even the darkin could not escape the sickness of soul that had come from fighting against the Void for so long. After centuries of uneasy alliance, they inevitably turned against one another—and so began the Great Darkin War.

This conflict spread from Shurima to Valoran, and beyond. The renegade god-warriors and the armies they raised were unstoppable, and entire nations were crushed between them. It seemed as though this would be the end of all things… until, unexpectedly, the mages of Runeterra learned how to contain the remaining darkin. Through secrecy and cunning artifice, the physical forms of the Ascended could be merged with the celestial power in their hearts, and all of it bound within the weapons they bore. With their leaders imprisoned forever, the rampaging hordes were broken and slain.

These darkin weapons were hidden, many of them carefully guarded by the mortal civilizations that grew in the aftermath—for it was clear that such power could be locked away, but never destroyed.

And, should such power fall into the wrong hands, the darkin will surely rise once more.