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Let me tell you about my glade.

On a clear night—like this night, in fact—when the moon is full and ripe, silver light glitters on star-shaped leaves with hair-fine fronds like threads of silk, and night-blooming Seleneia render my glade a magical wonderland.

A traveler might catch the scent of far distant continents on the wind. Only hints, to be sure, but such hints! A bouquet of desert spices, sun-baked stone, and salt from the crests of racing waves, mingled with the evergreen sap-scent of highland firs. You might think such a turn of phrase overly whimsical, words that might tumble from the lips of a hopeless romantic, or a lovelorn poet. You’d be right, of course, but that doesn’t make them any less true.

And while we’re on the subject of romantics—an artistic soul might, if they came here at just the right time, see dancing patterns in the moonglow dappling through the forest canopy. Their eye might follow it around, gradually sensing an order to the play of light and shadow across the bark of a tree, or in the ripples upon a pool of water. A pattern that almost looks like it might just form a doorway of sorts, if only it would complete.

But no matter how those patterns swirl and dance, they never fully coalesce into a whole. Almost never, that is. After all, the magic of these lands is skittish—with good reason—and doesn’t reveal its secrets to just anyone. We nature spirits are drawn to places like this. They nurture us, as we in turn nurture them. You can find us all over the world—in some places more than others, yes, but if there’s magic bubbling up, like as not you’ll find a spirit like me.

I flatter myself that the glade I inhabit is more infused with it than most other places in this land that mortals call Noxus—if you know the right way to look. Most of this world’s inhabitants have forgotten how to see, how to really see, but there are others, a whole race of them, in fact, who never forgot. They’re called yordles, and they’re not exactly from this world. I’m friends with a lot of them.

Two of them are approaching now. It sounds like they’re trying to get back to their kin, but they’re having trouble with the—for want of a better word—key that’s supposed to help them find their way home. You see, the low roads they travel don’t run on the surface of this world. Nor do they travel straight, like those of the men who call the lands hereabouts home. They curve and loop, swirling all around the place like a crazy knot you can’t ever untie.

Most yordles know how to travel them relatively easily, but these two?

Let’s just say they’re not the best-suited traveling companions. I can hear them, just beyond the spirit veil, bickering like a pair of hungry foxes.

They’ll be here soon, but I wonder if they know they’re not the only ones approaching.

Mortals are coming this way. Warriors. Armored in steel and stone, bearing instruments of death. I don’t like them, but don’t misunderstand my reasons. I understand death is necessary, a vital part of the natural cycle of being, but these people only take, and don’t give back. They pave over the land with roads that do not curve. They use their axes and saws to clear the land of growing things. They are an empire of angles and order. Nearby trees bend away from them in response, but they don’t notice, of course.

Mortals almost always miss their impact on the world around them.

A woman with long brown hair is the first to enter my wooded glade. She taps spurred heels to her horse’s flanks, and rides in a circle, scanning the treeline and ground for signs of life that might mean her harm.

Her eyes are cold, and she surveys the beauty of the trees like a woodsman sharpening an axe.

She halts her mount in the middle of the glade and sits in silence. She hears birdsong, the sighing of the forest, and the burbling stream flowing over time-smoothed rocks. Most people who come here are calmed by these sounds, their souls replenished simply by being in nature.

But not her.

None of the forest’s energy touches her, and I don’t know whether to feel sad or angry. The woman is patient, and only after several minutes pass does she lift her arm and spread her fingers wide. Moments later, a dozen riders appear at the edge of the glade. Their horses are exhausted, flanks lathered white and heads bowed. These animals have carried their riders a great distance, so I extend a little magic into their tired limbs. They whinny and toss their manes in gratitude.

A mustachioed man clad in leather and furs rides towards the woman. A bronze circlet holds his long dark hair from his face, and his tunic has been cut to show off his muscular build. A wolf-pelt cloak mantles his shoulders, and a pair of circle-grip axes are slung at his back. Like the woman, his gaze makes me fear what he might do to the trees.

Yes, I think I dislike him even more than the woman.

“What took you so long, Tamara?” he says. “Afraid we’ll be ambushed?”

She ignores his questions. “We should make camp here, Draven. Fresh water and plentiful wood. It’s broad and wide, too, so there’s limited avenues of approach.”

“Spoken like a true Noxian warmason.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

She slides from her saddle, and as soon as her boots hit the ground, I recoil from the stone in her veins, the iron in her soul. The sounds in the glade dim, but none of the humans notice.

“I want to reach the capital before we die of old age,” says Draven. “The fighting in Basilich was fun, but I need to get back to the arena and put these axes to good use.”

“You also want to go back and tell Darius you’d rather his army advance without a warmason carefully scouting the way?”

“We’re in no danger,” says Draven. “Not in the empire’s heartland.”

She folds her arms. “You heard what happened to Wintory outside Drekan?”

“No,” shrugs Draven, “but you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?”

She looks at him, then sighs and shakes her head. “What would be the point? It’s not about you, so you’re not going to care.”

I listen to them trade insults back and forth, but am confused at how the words they say don’t match the shimmering colors of their auras. It’s a source of great confusion to me that mortals spend so much time saying things they do not mean, and feeling things they do not express.

There’s an honesty to nature—albeit a bloody one—you can count on.

It’s nightfall when the yordles get here.

I feel the irresistible call of their key, and push a little of my power into the spirit realm to open the way. One of the silverbark trees shifts her branches windward slightly, and the last rays of sunset complete a glowing amber pattern on the gnarled knots of her mossy trunk. Shadow, light and ridged bark combine to form an endless loop that, from a certain angle and a certain height, looks like a portal into a land of eternal sunrise.

Whispers and song echo from the arbor in the heart of the tree. The Noxians are busy with their horses, and the animals make enough noise that the humans don’t hear it. It sounds like the winds are speaking, passing secrets between the trees. Maybe they are—you can never really know what the winds are saying. Well, maybe the blue bird of the seas knows, but she doesn’t roam far from the sunken city these days.

The grass around the base of the silverbark ripples in a warm breeze that carries a multitude of stories from another realm. I’ve heard hundreds of them, but the yordles have an inexhaustible supply, and I never tire of learning of their travels.

There’s a soft pop of air, like a bubble bursting on the surface of a lake…

…and two diminutive forms tumble out from the tree. They roll into the high grass, looking surprised to find themselves in a forest glade. One of them immediately picks herself up, and brings her big cannon to bear. She spins around. Left then right. She draws a bead on a rabbit with a half-chewed ear, poking a twitching nose from its burrow.

“Did you do this?” she asks.

The rabbit doesn’t answer. But then rabbits are stoic. You want a secret kept, but have to tell someone? Tell a rabbit, they’ll take it to their grave.

I know this yordle—she’s called Tristana, and she looks mad. Like she’s ready to march off to fight, but forgot which way the war was. Her purple skin is flushed a deeper shade than normal, and her white hair is swept back in a tight ponytail.

She hefts her cannon and aims it towards the rabbit.

It hops forward, unfazed by the threat.

“I won’t ask again,” says Tristana, “and Boomer never misses!”

The rabbit twitches its nose, cool as winter frost.

Tristana’s traveling companion sits up, a tiny, winged faerie circling her head. Ah, Lulu and Pix. Her wild purple hair billows in a wind that only seems to affect her, and her tall hat sits at a funny angle. It’s slipped over her eyes, and she taps around her with a curling stick.

“I’ve gone blind!” she says. “That’s new.”

Tristana keeps her gaze locked on the rabbit, and holds up a hand to silence Lulu, but her friend doesn’t see it. Lulu gets up and walks in a circle, tapping the ground in front of her. The flowers duck, and the buzzing glitterbugs scatter before Pix can pluck their wings. Lulu’s faerie companion is cute, but he’s got a strange sort of humor. I can’t ever tell if he’s really funny or rude. Maybe it’s both.

“Tristana! Are you there?” says Lulu.

Tristana sighs in exasperation. She taps two fingers to her eyes, then points them at the rabbit with a stern look.

“I’m watching you, flopsy,” she warns. Her jaw drops as she finally notices the humans in the glade. She darts over to Lulu and pushes her back against the tree. The portal they fell from is already fading as the light changes.

“Humans,” she hisses.

“Where?” says Lulu. “It’s all dark! But then, sometimes I see more with my eyes closed.”

Tristana sighs, and pulls the brim of Lulu’s hat up.

Lulu blinks, and hugs Tristana.

“It’s a miracle!”

“Quiet,” hisses Tristana, and Pix darts down to zap a tiny spike of violet light at her cheek.

Tristana bats the faerie away with a grimace.

I bend the shadows around the trees a little. Humans sometimes have a hard time seeing yordles, at least as they really are, but I think the woman with the cold eyes might be sharper than most, and I don’t want to see these two get hurt.

Tristana glances around the tree. The Noxians are making camp, but I’m relieved to see they’re not lighting a fire. Draven is grumbling about that, but Tamara is adamant they not broadcast their presence. I make sure all the wood in this glade is green and not good for fires. Doesn’t stop everyone who comes this way from trying their luck with an axe or saw… but most of them.

Tristana nods to herself.

“They haven’t seen us,” she whispers. “Good.”

“They look friendly,” says Lulu, peeking over Tristana’s shoulder. “I think we should say hello.”

“They’re Noxians,” replies Tristana, and I feel her exasperation. “You don’t talk to Noxians unless you want to lose your head.”

“Why? Do they like collecting heads?”

Tristana rolls her eyes, finally taking the time to examine her surroundings. I lift up some flowers and wave to her. She can’t help but feel the magic in the glade, and waves back. Some people say Tristana’s all business, and so very serious, but I know better.

She looks up at the tree and gives it an experimental rap with her knuckles. She taps gently around the bark, before finally hearing a booming echo from deep inside the tree. Some of the Noxians look up, and she winces. I creak some branches, and persuade the water to splash playfully over the rocks. The Noxians return to their work.

Tristana nods and says, “Thanks,” before turning back to Lulu and asking, “Right, where’s the whispering key?”

“The what-now?”

“The thing we’ve been using to travel through all the portals…”

“Remind me, what did it look like?”

“It looked a little like a compass made of carved stone.”

“Oh, you mean my doodad.”

“Your…,” begins Tristana before settling on, “Yes. That’s what I mean.”

Lulu does a pirouette and pats herself down, checking pockets that seem to appear and disappear at random. She closes one eye, and bites her lip, pulling out coins, dice, chips of precious stones and glittering fluff. But nothing resembling a key.

“I just had it.”

“Yes, you did,” agrees Tristana through gritted teeth. “You used it to open the portal on the beach while we were running from that pack of cragwolves, after we’d dropped in on Poppy.”

“I like Poppy, but she’s so serious,” says Lulu, stomping around as if she’s marching on a parade ground. She pauses to stare at Tristana. “Wait! Are you and her actually the same yordle?”

“No, of course we’re not,” sighs Tristana. “Now, will you hurry up, please?”

“You could be, you know. Same hair, and that little furrow just above your nose when you get mad. See, there it is!”

Getting angry with Lulu won’t do any good. It would be like chasing a cub that’s stolen your shoe; it’s all part of a fun game. I send a cooling breeze to ruffle Tristana’s white hair, but it doesn’t seem to help.

“The whispering… I mean, your doodad? Can you just get it for me?”

“Oh, right, yes, I was looking for that, wasn’t I?”

“Yes. Yes, you were.”

Lulu sighs, making a theatrical show of befuddlement. She looks up at the darkening sky and snaps her fingers.

“No wonder I can’t find it,” she says. “It’s too dark!”

She lifts her crooked staff, and Tristana’s eyes widen as she realizes what Lulu’s about to do. But it’s too late to stop her.

A stream of glitter bursts from the end of Lulu’s staff and explodes like a swarm of dancing fireflies overhead. The glade is bathed in the glow of a thousand stars and a secret gathering of moons.

“Aha!” says Lulu, finally pulling out something from a fold in her tunic. It looks like a cross between a budding seedpod and a curling seashell. A rainbow of colorful lines swirls on its surface, and what look like tiny tadpoles swim inside it. “Here it is.”

Tristana looks horrified as the light from Lulu’s staff floods the glade, but before she can react, a spinning axe blade flashes between the two of them and buries itself in the bark of the tree.

Lulu almost jumps out of her skin, and the seedpod-seashell flies from her hand.

The silverbark cries out in pain, so I pour magic up through her roots and into the heartwood. Vivid amber sap oozes from the gouge in the wounded tree’s bark, pinning the axe in place.

Lulu’s doodad sails through the air to land somewhere in the middle of the glade. It rolls into the tall grass, and I feel its primal energies pulse outwards in a rippling wave.

“Oops,” says Lulu.

A veritable flurry of black-shafted arrows slices through the undergrowth as the Noxians respond the only way they know how.

“Get back!” shouts Tristana, swinging Boomer around and dragging Lulu away to find cover behind a moldy log covered in moss and ivy.

An arrow punches into the rotten wood. Another splits the night a hair’s breadth from Tristana’s ear. Lulu squeals, and Pix darts to Tristana’s side. Fresh wildflowers of blue, gold, and crimson instantly bloom on the dead wood.

Tristana fires Boomer. Blam, blam, blam!

Everyone ducks. Noxians, rabbits, and glitterbugs. Even the worms burrow deeper.

Boomer’s cannonballs streak burning streamers across the glade, and spouts of water leap from the stream to cool them as they ricochet from the rocks. The last thing we want in the glade is a fire!

“Spread out!” yells Draven, running to retrieve his axe from the silverbark’s trunk.

The Noxians are quick to obey.

Say what you want about the Noxians—and I’ve heard plenty of humans passing through my glade who have a lot to say about Noxians—they’re disciplined! Tamara runs to her horse and draws a slender rapier from a saddle scabbard.

She grins at Draven and says, “No chance of an ambush, eh?”

Draven shrugs, and his aura gives no sense of any alarm or care at being proven wrong. All I sense is glee at the chance to spill blood.

Yes, I definitely dislike him more than Tamara.

The Noxian warriors spread through the glade, moving forward in pairs, as archers loose steady volleys of arrows to keep the two yordles from moving. I know nothing of war, but even I can see the deadly tactics of the Noxians will see Lulu and Tristana dead.

I’m all for fun and games, but I don’t want anyone killed…

Magic surges through the ground in a powerful wave. I weave loops of grass that tangle the feet of the first Noxian soldier, a great brute of a man with a double-bladed axe. He goes down hard, slicing open his arm as he falls flat on his face. His companion trips over him, dropping her sword, and the man cries out in pain as it stabs a handspan into his buttock.

An amberwood tree twists its trunk and whips its willowy branches around like a catapult. It smacks a crouching archer in the face, and he topples backwards. The arrow he was poised to loose goes straight up in the air. A careful gust of wind, and it plunges down between his legs, tearing his britches open at the crotch. He yelps in alarm and scrambles back on his haunches.

Tristana fires again, and Pix jumps onto her head, punching the air and shouting squeaking insults with every shot. Flowers fall from the air above the tiny faerie, and I see more than one arrow deflected around the yordle gunner by their shimmering petals.

“Can you see your doodad?” shouts Tristana over the cannon’s noise.

Lulu spins her staff around, and springs onto its shepherd’s crook handle. She shades her eyes with one hand, and peers through the fading illumination. An arrow slashes towards her, but the coiled point of her hat smacks it from the air.

“Nope, but then I don’t know what it looks like now.”

“What do you mean you don’t know what it looks like now?”

Lulu spins in a spiral down her staff, and daisies spring up around her as she lands. “The doodad’s a bit flighty, you see. Every time I put it down, it likes to try out a different shape.”

Tristana groans as Lulu sends a blazing shaft of sparkling light through the trees. A pair of Noxians are hurled through the air. They land in the stream, and I immediately mob them with a knot of frogs. The tongues of bucket-frogs are coated with slime that will give them waking dreams, and ought to send them to the moon and back.

“So it could look like anything?” asks Tristana.

“Pretty much,” agrees Lulu. “Just look for it out of the corner of your eye. It only changes if it thinks you’re looking right at it.”

“I never thought I’d say this, but I wish Heimer was here right now,” says Tristana. “We could really use his hex-goggles.”

“Don’t be silly,” says Lulu. “That’d take all the fun out of this.”

Tristana spins on her heel to fire at a Noxian leaping towards her. Her cannonball punches him square in the chest and he flies back into a thorny bush that suddenly gets a lot more thorny.

“Fun?” she says. Then she grins. “You know what, you’re right. Let’s have some fun with these numpties. Grab on.”

Lulu laughs and throws her arms around Tristana’s neck as if she’s about to give her a big sloppy kiss. Tristana fires again, and this time her cannon is aimed at the ground. The two yordles erupt from behind the flowery, arrow-studded log and arc over the heads of the advancing soldiers. The Noxians watch in open-mouthed surprise as the two yordles spin over their heads, giggling musically as they go.

Who knows what the Noxians are seeing? Something strange, no doubt. A yordle’s glamour is an inconstant thing, and even they don’t know how others see them most of the time.

Gleaming bolts corkscrew from Lulu’s staff, and everywhere they hit, Noxians are thrown from their feet in a spray of petals and sparks that burn like drops of venom. The two yordles land on the run, and while Tristana spins around, firing at any Noxians who rear their heads, Lulu scrambles around on all fours in search of her doodad.

“Here, doodad,” she whispers to the grass. “Pretty please, with sprinkles on top! I’ll let you take us somewhere you want to go next.”

The doodad—or whatever it’s really called—doesn’t respond, but I sense it rolling away from Lulu. Well, not really rolling, as such, more making itself be where she isn’t. It’s a thing of old and powerful magic, but not without a childish sense of whimsy. It’s like it thinks this is a fun game. Perhaps it is, as Lulu is laughing with delight, spinning around and bounding through the glade like a weasel chasing its own tail as she chases her doodad. It turns into a large snail as Lulu gets close to it. And when she takes her hand away, sticky, it turns into a puff of light before reappearing behind Lulu as a stick-man tottering away on mismatched legs.

Tristana’s keeping the Noxians’ heads down with a barrage of cannon fire. I hear Draven finally wrench his axe from the silverbark, its edge all gummy with sap. He turns and moves from cover to cover, stalking Tristana like a cat, all taut limbs and steely focus. He draws his arm back, ready to throw his other axe.

A squadron of buzzing wasps swoops in and swarms him as a battalion of angry squirrels drops from the trees. His axe flies wide of the mark, thudding back to earth where the Noxian horses used to be. Now there’s only a mess of hoofprints and a few discarded saddles. Draven spins around in a frenzy, pulling the scratching, biting squirrels from his arms and neck. Squirrels are the thugs of the forest. Rabbits might be stoic, but squirrels will bite your ear off as soon as your back’s turned.

Lulu’s not even looked up. She’s still running in circles and giggling like a child as she shoots puffs of light from her staff.

With an explosive burst of speed, Tamara breaks from cover and runs straight for Lulu. I use my magic to throw distractions in her path. Frantic moles dig holes before her, but she weaves between their hasty traps. The thorny stems of a hookbrush whip at her, but she skids under them. She looks around, starting to understand she has another enemy here—one she can’t see or fight.

“Gotcha!” cries Lulu, finally grabbing hold of her doodad. Now it looks like a knotted bunch of twigs held together by loops of grass and spiderwebs.

Tamara dives over a coiling root I rip up from the earth, and rolls to her feet. The last sparkles of Lulu’s starburst gleam on the rapier as Tamara pulls it back to strike.

And then Tristana’s there.

She hefts Boomer as if her cannon’s suddenly gotten heavier.

A lot heavier.

“That’s my friend, buster,” she says, and pulls the trigger.

The booming thunder of the cannon is deafening, and birds as far away as two rivers west take to the sky at the noise. A blazing tongue of fire erupts from the muzzle as a giant cannonball blasts out. The force of the recoil spins Tristana around, but that’s nothing compared to what it does to Tamara.

She flies backwards like she’s been punched by an angry stone golem. She vanishes into the trees, and I don’t think she’ll be getting up any time soon.

Then Tristana is hauled from her feet by the scruff of her neck. Boomer drops to the earth and Draven holds her up to his face with a bemused grin on his scratched and bleeding face.

“Now, what in the name of the Wolf are you?”

“Put me down, ya big oaf!” yells Tristana.

She kicks and swings her fists at him, but not even her pluck can overcome the length of his limbs. Draven cocks his head to one side, clearly wondering what he’s got his hands on.

“Hey, why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” yells Lulu, aiming her staff towards Draven. Swirling fireworks ripple up and down its length, but Draven doesn’t look impressed.

“Do your worst, shorty,” he says. “You ain’t got nothing can hurt Draven.”

The fireworks shoot out of Lulu’s staff in a storm of light.

And miss.

Draven laughs, spinning his axe up.

But then a tall shadow falls over him, and he slowly turns around.

That’s when he realizes Lulu didn’t miss at all.

The rabbit with the half-chewed ear looms over Draven, twice his height at least. It munches slowly on a carrot—a carrot that’s as long as Draven’s arm. He drops Tristana as the giant rabbit taps two stubby fingers of its paw to its eyes, then points them at Draven with a stern look.

Draven is a warrior, and has fought his share of monsters, but this is too much even for him. He turns and sprints for the trees, pausing only to scoop up his other axe as he goes. The rest of the Noxians have already fled, or are backing away slowly into the undergrowth at the sight of the giant rabbit. Something tells me they will find a different route for their master’s army.

Tristana turns to look at the rabbit with the half-chewed ear.

“Thanks,” she says, but the rabbit doesn’t reply. Like I said, stoic.

It turns and makes its way back to its burrow in a series of thudding hops. By the time it reaches the entrance, it’s more or less returned to its normal size. It squeezes into the burrow with a final waggle of its tail and a puff of earth.

Tristana slings Boomer over her shoulder. “Do you have your doodad?”

Lulu holds it up triumphantly. “My very naughty doodad. Shouldn’t run off like that!”

Tristana shakes her head and marches back to the tree they fell out of. Lulu skips after her as Pix buzzes overhead, riding a pair of wasps with a tiny squeal of delight.

Lulu catches up with Tristana and waves her doodad at the tree in what might be a predetermined pattern, or might just be her hoping for the best. Whatever it is, it works, and the leafy arbor reappears in the silverbark’s trunk. Sunrise over the land of the yordles spills into my moonlit glade. I feel its ancient magic, and I send a pulse of my own through the air, wishing my two friends interesting travels.

Lulu pauses and looks over her shoulder.

“Thank you,” she says, and I feel the boundless joy in her heart.

The beauty of my glade is made all the richer for it.

“Come on, we should get going,” says Tristana.

“Why are you in such a hurry?”

“We should be gone before the Noxians return.”

“I don’t think they’ll be coming back,” says Lulu with a wide grin.

The light of the portal swells outwards in a glowing, rippling spiral to envelop the yordles. Their forms blur, and their voices grow faint as they are drawn away once more. But I hear Tristana’s last words, and cold winds pass through the glade in a ripple of unease.

“They’re Noxians,” she says. “They always come back.”

A riotous domain of constant transformation, Bandle City was no place for a yordle like Kennen. Searching for harmony and balance, he ventured out from the spirit realm millennia ago. He explored the material realm with boundless curiosity, traveling great distances in a heartbeat. But he was drawn in particular to Ionia.

In the First Lands, he witnessed ancient wars that none now remember, and a land struggling to rebuild afterward. Kennen grew fascinated by a people seeking balance for themselves and their home. Over time, he returned to Bandle City less and less, choosing to remain in Ionia, where yordles were respected as creatures of the spirit realm. Though he did not age as beings of the material realm did, Kennen embraced mortals, studying them for generations. He admired how, despite their fragile lives, they were diligent protectors of the sacred balance.

Even so, there were threats to the tranquility of Ionia. Malevolent entities of the spirit realm traversed the land with ill intent. Kennen battled these disturbances alone for years, enjoying the fun each challenge brought, but in the end he understood he was doing little to address why the incursions were happening: imbalance. He discovered a fledgling order whose members actively pursued balance between the realms—who, after careful observation, would judge what needed to be done to restore it.

They called themselves the Kinkou.

Kennen was intrigued by the order, led by a distant Eye of Twilight and a vindictive Fist of Shadow. He realized that the Kinkou’s leadership required another aspect. A consensus builder, one who would prevent the warlike Fist from domineering over the introspective Eye, and likewise keep the Eye’s tireless observation from paralyzing the Fist.

As a creature of both the spirit and material realms, Kennen proposed that he was uniquely suited to be an arbiter. The order accepted Kennen’s wisdom, and he became the Kinkou’s first Heart of the Tempest. As part of the new triumvirate with the Eye of Twilight and the Fist of Shadow, Kennen passed judgment on how best to preserve balance, and his affability and diplomacy kept the Kinkou in harmony.

Moreover, Kennen noticed that a rift had grown between the order and the people around them, as judgments were carried out swiftly, mysteriously, and without chance for appeal. Again, the yordle realized he could fill a need for the Kinkou. With his fantastic speed and compassion, he was the ideal representative to communicate the judgments of the order to those affected by them. He’d seen how the Kinkou distanced themselves from the people, wearing masks over their faces, and took care to remove his to connect with those he sought to protect.

Yet there was another side to Kennen, a far more serious aspect as Heart of the Tempest. Charged with Coursing the Sun, he addressed challenges to the Kinkou’s judgments, and not always with words.

For sometimes, the cost of balance was the blood of the offender—and Kennen’s shuriken and summoned maelstroms were quite capable of silencing all dissent.

There have been many threats to the Kinkou over the centuries, but none as grave as the Noxian invasion and its aftermath. When Noxus invaded the First Lands, Kennen opposed joining the resistance, even as the war threatened to tear the Kinkou apart. In their darkest hour, after a coup led by a former acolyte named Zed, the yordle guided the order while the new Eye of Twilight, Shen, struggled to lead. Kennen urged the Fist of Shadow, Mayym, to look to her daughter Akali, whom he’d trained since childhood, and see her as a successor.

But even he couldn’t find the words to stop Akali from eventually leaving the Kinkou, frustrated at the order’s failure to act against Ionia’s enemies.

Recent events have tested Kennen, a new age of disruption and violence that has thrown Ionia into chaos. Come what may, he will protect the fractured Kinkou Order, fighting alongside Shen to defend the balance of the First Lands. Do not let Kennen’s diminutive appearance fool you—for the heart of the tempest is its calmest part, but when it turns its eye upon you, its force is never more than a moment behind.

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.

Many years ago, in a kingdom to the south of the great Elderwood, there lived a good-natured husband and wife who worked as toymakers. They had a young daughter whose name was Rowan, as gentle and pleasant as a child could be, and together they lived quite happily making all manner of playthings from the wood of the forest.

The toys fashioned by Rowan’s parents were greatly desired, even by members of the noble houses, and because of this they became wealthy and well-renowned. The toys were never damaged no matter how roughly children played, and never grew old no matter how much time had passed, and each was a work of art unique in everything but name, never to be made again―for this was the magic of the Elderwood, such as it was back then.

It had been said that Rowan’s great-grandfather had once saved a fledgling spirit, and in return his family had been blessed for one-hundred-and-two years, so that they might harvest a single tree each year and from it make as many creations as they desired. No creature would harm him or his descendants, even the Great Guardian Hecarim, so long as his family never turned against the denizens of the forest, and not more than a single tree was taken on the first day of spring. They must also live away from the walls of the city, to signify the bond of spirit and man, and in return the Elderwood would extend its protection to their kin forevermore.

Rowan’s family did respect the terms of this agreement for one-hundred-and-one years, and they were joyful for it.

On the eve of the one-hundred-and-second year, a nobleman from a foreign land visited Rowan and her parents. His name was Brín, and he fancied himself a king, though in truth his lands were small and his influence was quite minor among the lords and ladies of the kingdoms. As such he was obsessed with baubles giving the appearance of wealth and status, and so mesmerized by these wooden toys that he decided he must have as many as he could, so that in his court they might be considered commonplace.

“Honored toymaker,” he declared, “these treasures are priceless, and yet ye would sell them for such a pittance to the children of this land. Is it not more prudent to create them for a noble such as I? I could pay thee greatly, and fill thy coffers, so thy family may never want again.”

But Rowan’s father refused, as the Elderwood provided all the family needed. “I do not wish to sell my wares for profit, though their fame has blessed me greatly. I strive only to honor my agreement with the great forest, as my father did, and his father before.”

“Honored toymaker,” declared Brín, “thy fame is known throughout the lands, and yet ye would live among the edges of the untamed wilds. Craft these treasures in the name of my house, and I will build ye a great manse upon the riverbank, so ye might be the envy of all other men.”

Again, Rowan’s father refused, as even when they could harvest the trees no further, his family would always have a place among the fair folk of the Elderwood. “I am sorry,” he said, “but ye may purchase any wares within these walls, and bring them back to thy court. They never age or wear, and I am sure that will suffice.”

Now Brín did become furious. “If thou would’st reject such a generous offer, I will burn thy workshop to the ground. The Elderwood does not extend as far as my kingdom, and by the time its children come to thine aid thy life will be spent, and thy family slaughtered. I will take these treasures for my own, and that will be the end of it.”

With this, Rowan’s father relented, and the lord Brín would return one month hence, to claim every toy crafted from the final gifted tree.

“Father,” said Rowan, for she knew much despite her years, “what will we do? Though his lands are few, that man is a lord nonetheless, and might call upon a great many knights.”

“True,” said Rowan’s father, “but in his hubris he disregards the spirits of the wood. Take warm clothes from thy mother, and a bindle of foodstuffs, and go to the place called Copperwood Glade. There, thy eyes will fall upon a great tree as hard as armor plate. Sleep softly at its base, and the spirit that blesses this house will appear in a dream to barter with ye. But beware, for it is not a kind spirit, but a violent one. If thy words are false, or thy offers unfair, or it senses darkness in thy heart, then it will cut thy soul away, and thy body will never wake.”

And so Rowan did take warm clothes from her mother, and a bindle of food, and travel into the Elderwood, as her parents raced to carve toys for the lord Brín, in case her quest failed.

Before long Rowan did stumble upon a quiet glade apart from the forest, at its center an ancient tree whose bark shone like polished copper. Around it were the bones of many people, their tattered belongings covered in deep, green moss. Rowan could not hear the birds or the streams of the whispers of the countless spirits in this place―only silence, as though not even the wind would dare disturb its countless secrets. She felt a great dread here, as though she were being watched, but despite her fear she unpacked her bindle, and buttoned up her warm coat, and rested herself against the base of the copperwood tree as her father had told her to do.

Soon enough, she fell deeply asleep. The sun’s rays danced across her cheeks, and it seemed that these old bones strewn about were barely a bother anymore.

She awoke in the dead of night, to the sound of a hymn.

Now Rowan was brave and kind, but the words creaked and moaned like a beetle-filled log, and rustled like the branches of an old, dead willow, and soon enough her fear returned to her. Her father’s warning did echo in her ears, warning of a vicious thing, and so Rowan cried out, “Art thou the spirit of Copperwood Glade?”

And for a while the hymn continued, as if to answer the question.

Then the logs and the moss and the branches and the trees grew still, and the hymn ceased, and a strange, misshapen apparition did appear at the edges of the glade. Its arms hung low, and ended in sharpened blades, and its head turned unnaturally against its strange wooden body, and it looked at Rowan without expression.

“Hwæt þú gewilnunge mædencild?” said the spirit, its voice creaking like rotten timber.

But this was the old tongue, older by far even than Rowan’s great-grandfather, and she could not understand it.

“Ah,” said the spirit, “it has been many years since thy ancestor lent me his aid. Forgive me, for time does not pass for us as it does for thee, and often I confuse the mortal tongues. I am called Nocturne, and I am the spirit you seek. What dost thou desire, child? I wish to hear thy words. But speak not falsely, or I will cut thy soul away, and thy body will rot in the glade with those others who have aimed to trick a creature such as I.”

Yet the spirit did not draw closer, and Rowan’s fear would not subside.

“O, Nocturne,” she said. “One-hundred-and-one years have passed since ye blessed my house, and this year will be the last. We have always honored thy will, and the will of the Elderwood, and from this we will never falter. But a lord named Brín now threatens us with death, and we entreat thee for protection.”

“Ah,” said Nocturne, drawing closer. Rowan saw that he floated above the ground, and scraped his long blades across it as he went, and the bones beneath them were sliced clean in twain as though they were made from air. “I have heard of this Brín, and his lands to the west, where the air is warm and the forest thin. Should he slay thy family and steal thy treasures, I promise to take his life in return.”

“O, Nocturne,” replied Rowan, “we are unlike spirits of the wood. We have but a single life, and when it is spent go from this world hence, and do not return. Couldst thou act against him now? Would that I could offer something to a spirit such as thee, in payment...”

“Ah,” said Nocturne, drawing closer still. His hands trembled in excitement, and his blades clicked as they cut the stones and armor and paltry belongings scattered before him, and Rowan did feel within him a thirst for violence. “Perhaps if I had something fresh to eat, and something warm to wear, then I could make the journey westward.”

And Rowan did give Nocturne her bindle of foodstuffs, and her warm clothes, despite his body of bark and blades.

“Ah,” said Nocturne, rising up before Rowan, his carved face peering into her eyes. “But are thy words true? I wonder, what is the content of thy heart?”

And he sank a blade deep inside her chest, and raised her body high above his head. Yet Rowan was silent, and resolute, for she knew her fate when she saw the bones scattered about Copperwood Glade, and had accepted it gladly.

Nocturne then lowered Rowan, and placed her before him, and her wounds were healed. “Your words are spoken truly, and your offerings are given freely, and your heart is kind. You will not die upon this day. Go back to your home, and live your life, and the lord Brín will never trouble thee again.”

And Rowan did thank the spirit, and when she awoke she returned to her home at the edge of the Elderwood, and her family went on to take the final tree and then lived happily for many generations until they became one with the forest, as was the agreement they had struck so many years before.

As for Lord Brín, he and his knights were slain by a vicious spirit while they rested, and his kingdom fell into a dark slumber from which it never awakened. The Elderwood grew quickly towards these lands, and consumed them utterly within the year, with nary a soul escaping. One can still find their ruins in the place now known as Somberwood, where it is said the spirit Nocturne visits from time-to-time, to admire his handiwork.

For most people, a hundred years is a very long time. In a century, one could explore the entire world, meet thousands of people, or complete countless works of art. Now, anyone could easily assume that standing in one spot for over a century would be a colossal waste. But during that time, Ivern Bramblefoot accomplished more than any could dream.

For instance, he settled a longstanding dispute between a colony of lichen and their host boulder, helped each generation of winter squirrels find their forgotten autumn acorns, and coaxed a lone wolf to rejoin her pack, despite the fact that they once called her howling “shrill.”

Ivern’s toes burrowed deep beneath the topsoil, curled between vigilant tubers and oblivious earthworms to mingle with the roots of older trees, and the forest around him bloomed. There was much more, of course, but those examples alone are proof enough of a good century’s work.

Things were going swimmingly until the sassafras started murmuring about dark doings on the edge of the forest.

Hunters! they cried through their roots, alarming half the forest.

Ivern knew sassafras to be anxious trees, raising their leaves in panic over the slightest stray saltsnail, and after all, hunting wasn’t so bad, for nothing is wasted or senseless in the cycle of life. But the sassafras had worried the robins, who told the butterflies, and if butterflies knew a secret, so did the entire forest.

So Ivern stood up, and after briefly soothing the clipper ant colony whose ancestral home he had just displaced, he stalked away, shaking off layers of crusty bark. With each flower-blooming step through the forest, the alarm grew more frantic.

Three of them, nattered the squirrels.

Eyes like twin blood moons, gibbered the scuttle-crabs as they hid in the river.

More bloodthirsty than elmarks, proclaimed the elmarks.

The peregrines swore the hunters were after their eggs. The ivory-wreathed chrysanthemum feared for her illustrious petals—that worried Daisy, who loved her flowers dearly. Ivern calmed each of them, and urged them to hide until trouble passed. He pretended not to notice Daisy following him, since she thought herself to be quite sneaky.

He saw an eight-tusked shagyak dead in the grass. Three arrows were thrust deep into the thick hump of muscle at the base of its neck. As a sappy tear escaped Ivern’s eye, a squirrel he’d named Mikkus scampered up the Green Father’s chest and lapped it off his cheek in solace.

“Hunters take meat for food,” Ivern said aloud. “Hunters whittle bone into toys and tools. Hunters sew pelts into garments and tan skin into boots.”

The corpse was missing its eight shimmering, pearlescent tusks. Ivern touched the ground, and a circle of daisies bloomed around the dead shagyak. He saw a baby stonescale viper slithering away. Stone-scale vipers are wise beyond their years.

“Ssssssssafe?” the snake hiss-asked.

Ivern knew snakes were embarrassed by their lisps and for a long time had avoided words with sibilant sounds. He’d challenged them to embrace the words they feared the most, but they took the lesson to heart and now spoke exclusively in words beginning “s.”

Snakes; such overachievers.

“It’s safe now, little one.” Poor thing must’ve witnessed the whole ordeal. “Coil up here and watch the shagyak for me,” Ivern urged the baby viper. “I’ll return once I get to the bottom of this.”

The shagyak horns clacked relentlessly with each step Risbell took, so much so that she had to stop and repack the tusks lest the noise scare off their next kill. Upriver, those horns would earn them a fortune. City people paid well for half-cocked backwater remedies these days.

Niko, the square-jawed hunter with one eye, uncovered another set of shagyak hoof prints. She beckoned behind her to Eddo, the rich city man with the whalebone bow, and grinned. Eddo’s toothy smile and malicious eyes made Risbell, the youngest of the crew, shiver.

Up ahead, in a glade, another eight-tusked shagyak grazed on its very favorite variety of grass. Each of the three hunters approached slowly and quietly, rustling nary a dead leaf.

In rehearsed synchronicity, all three readied their bows and took careful aim. The shagyak’s head was still bent low, as it dined on the soft mulderberries and scullygrass, obscuring the knot of muscles at the base of its neck. When pierced, the hump would keep the blood flowing while the hunters hewed off horns. It was very important that the shagyak still be alive when the tusks were harvested to increase their potency, Eddo said.

Sweat beaded down her neck as she waited for the shagyak to raise its head. Just as the beast’s head swung up, the glade of low scullygrass bloomed impossibly fast, from ankle height to over their heads in a moment. The stalks stretched toward the sun, flowers blooming instantly in an array of radiant petals. A flowering wall of scullygrass completely obscured the shagyak.

Eddo dropped his bow. Niko’s one good eye looked as if it was going to bulge from its socket. Risbell’s arrow errantly soared through the air. She didn’t command her fingers to release the bowstring. She backed up against the nearest tree, terrified.

“I told you these woods were cursed,” Risbell whispered. “We should leave now.”

“I’ve dealt with sorcery before,” Niko said. “I will do this the old way.”

She placed her arrow back in her quiver and pulled a long, mean-looking dagger from her belt.

Eddo did the same. They both beckoned for Risbell to stay put with the tusks as they stealthily disappeared into the wall of grass. She waited and held her breath, but couldn’t even hear their footfalls. One day she hoped to be as silently deadly as her companions. Still, she couldn’t shake the unnerving feeling that the wall of vegetation was a warning to be heeded. Stories her grandmother told her, of the strange creatures of magic that wandered this world, came back to her. Just children’s tales, she reminded herself.

An eerie and unfamiliar sound echoed through the glade. It wasn’t the shrieking of a shagyak, but the heavy sound of rocks smashing into ground with loud, splintery thuds. Whatever caused the sound, it was enough to make Eddo and Niko race out of the brush, running at full tilt. Their skin was pale and their eyes were wide. Then she saw what had caused her companions to flee.

A flower, a simple ivory-wreathed chrysanthemum, was dancing on top of the grass. It was a rather curious sight.

Then Risbell realized it was getting closer. The grass parted, and there stood a behemoth of stone and moss. A living incarnation of granite, massively strong, and moving with rhythm. In the moment it took Risbell to reconcile what was happening, she heard a calm voice calling to the creature.

“Daisy! Be careful. And... gentle!”

Risbell grabbed the satchel of tusks and ran after Niko and Eddo, trying to remember the route that led back to their camp. At each tree, a new wall of grass sprouted up. Something stalked within the grass, rustling through the leaves as it walked, giggling as Risbell spun in circles trying to find her way out. She was alone in a strange forest, and behind every infernal tree lurked more grass, springing up nearly instantly.

Risbell realized she was being corralled the same way grandmother used to herd sheep. Knowing full well that she was walking into a trap, Risbell squared her shoulders and followed the grass.

Ivern watched as the young hunter stepped out of the grassy maze and approached the shagyak’s body. The poor thing looked positively terrified. She clearly had never seen anything or anyone quite like himself before. He tried to be gentle, but humans tended to be so individual in their reactions. Unlike, say, the caterwauling of smug mewlarks.

“Please. Don’t be frightened. Unless that is your natural state. In which case, fright away. I’ll wait. I really don’t mind.”

It wasn’t Ivern’s intention to frighten anyone. But no one can account for another being’s experience.

“Get on with it,” Risbell said. Her voice quavered and her eyes flinched. “I’ve trespassed, I know. I’m at your mercy. Just let it be quick.”

“Be quick?” Ivern shrugged. “Certainly. It didn’t cross my mind that you might have better places to be. Very well then.”

The girl closed her eyes and lifted her chin, exposing her throat. She reached her hand back toward the scabbard at her belt and wrapped her knuckles around the dagger. If he came for her, there would be a surprise.

“But I only want to know why,” Ivern said in a voice filled with merriment. He gestured with his branchlike fingers to the shagyak’s body. His arm stretched longer than it should, to the dead beast’s back, where he lovingly stroked its blood-mottled fur.

Risbell drew her dagger and then felt a sharp pain in her ankle. A cold sensation spread up her leg. When she looked down, she saw the culprit: a stone-scaled viper, the most venomous asp in all the Aulderwood.

Out of anger and instinct, she lashed out at the snake.

“No!” Ivern shouted.

Viney roots sprouted up from the soil and caught her arm, preventing her strike. They wrapped around her wrists and ankles and knees. She dropped her dagger in her struggles to break free.

“I’m going to die!” she cried. The venom’s coldness spread up past her knees.

The serpent slithered to Ivern’s feet and coiled up the outside of his leg, climbing up and around his body until it vanished into his armpit. It emerged from the back of his head, curling around one of the branches, and licked its forked tongue at Ivern’s ear.

“Sssssssorry,” hissed the snake to Ivern. “Ssssstartled.”

“Please,” Risbell said. “Help me.”

Ivern thought for a second.

“Ah yes!” His honey eyes twinkled with an idea. “There’s one thing that loves shagyaks. Especially dead ones.

“And please, forgive Syrus; he’s only recently hatched and doesn’t know how to control his venom. Gave you a full dose, I’m afraid. He’s asked me to tell you that he’s awfully sorry. You startled him and he reacted purely on instinct,” Ivern said. “Now, watch.”

The tree man knelt before the shagyak’s body, closed his eyes, and hummed a deep, earthy tune. His hands were in the soil, fingers splayed out. Twinkling green pops of light cascaded from his rune-carved head, down his arms, and into the dirt. Odd purple mushrooms popped up from the carcass. They were tiny at first; then their stalks rose as rot overtook the shagyak’s corpse. Soon there was only fur, bones, and an army of violet mushrooms.

“Ah, stingsalve fungus,” Ivern sighed. He plucked one delicately. “Always so punctual.”

The vines retracted from Risbell’s body. She collapsed in a heap. Her hands immediately shot to her heart. The icy pangs of stone-scale venom had reached her chest.

“Eat this,” Ivern said, offered the purple mushroom to the dying woman. “It might not taste like salamander dew or sunshine, but it’s not as bad as lippertick apples.”

Risbell had no idea what the strange treeman was on about, but her options were severely limited at that moment. A voice came back to her from the past. Her grandmother’s. Trust in nature; the Green Father never leads you astray.

She grabbed the mushroom from Ivern’s hand. It tasted like bitter tea and mulch; a disappointing final meal. Then the icy grip around her heart thawed and retreated. Within minutes, her legs worked again.

As she recovered, Ivern made her a tincture of odd leaves, tree sap, and water from a spring he’d discovered with his toes. He served it to her in a bird’s nest cup that a peregrine dropped into his hand.

“You’re him, aren’t you? The Green Father.”

Ivern shrugged as if he didn’t know. “You know what we could do here?” he said, turning his attention to the shagyak bones. “Moss always loves to pretty up the place.”

As soon as he said it, a thick carpet of moss crept over the bones. With the mushrooms, what once had been a grisly sight was now beautiful.

“Sheldon would love how beautiful his bones turned out to be. Badgers will use his ribs as shelter from the autumn storms. Nothing is ever wasted,” Ivern said, turning his attention to Risbell. “It seemed so senseless, but it makes perfect sense. If it wasn’t killed, you wouldn’t have lived.”

“We wanted its tusks,” Risbell said. She fixed her eyes on her boots in shame. “Rich people clamor for them. Willing to pay a lot.”

“I remember money. It’s rarely a good motivator.”

“I knew we shouldn’t have killed it. My grandmother used to tell me that if one must kill, one must use all parts to honor the beast.”

“I would love to meet your grandmother,” Ivern said.

“She is gone to the ground.”

“Returning to the soil that which the soil gave is noble.”

“I’m sorry,” Risbell said after a long moment of silence.

“All life is precious.” The gentleness and warmth and forgiveness in Ivern’s voice moved Risbell to tears. Ivern patted her on the head. “I probably couldn’t have handled the whole thing better myself. I’ve so much to remember about humans, and so much too I had forgotten to ever learn.”

Ivern helped Risbell to her feet.

“I must be off now. I promised the tadpoles of Southern Pond that I would monitor their elections for the king of lily pads. It’s quite the contentious race.”

A while later, Risbell emerged from the tree line near the river. After gulping down some water, she dug a hole on the banks and tenderly placed the shagyak tusks inside. She scooped up a handful of dirt and recited the prayers of honor her grandmother had taught her. She repeated this ritual until the horns were buried. Then she bowed her head in reverence and left the site marked as a grave.

From the depths of the Aulderwood, Ivern smiled at the gesture. The shagyak herd would be proud.

Ionia has always been a land of wild magic, its vibrant people and powerful spirits seeking to live in harmony… but sometimes this peaceful equilibrium does not come easily. Sometimes it needs to be kept in check.

The Kinkou are the self-appointed keepers of Ionia’s sacred balance. The order’s loyal acolytes walk the spirit and material realms, mediating conflicts between them and, when necessary, intervening by force. Born among their ranks was Akali, daughter of Mayym Jhomen Tethi, the renowned Fist of Shadow. Mayym and her partner Tahno raised their daughter within the Kinkou Order, under the watchful leadership of Great Master Kusho, the Eye of Twilight.

Whenever her parents were called away, other members of the order stepped in as Akali’s surrogate family. Kennen, the Heart of the Tempest, spent many hours with the young girl, teaching her shuriken techniques, and emphasizing speed and agility over strength. Akali was a precocious child, and soaked up the knowledge like a sponge. It became clear to all that she would follow her parents’ path—along with the Great Master’s son and appointed successor Shen, she would lead a new generation dedicated to preserving Ionia’s balance.

But balance can be fleeting. The order found itself divided.

A wayward acolyte named Zed returned, and clashed violently with Kusho, wresting power in a bloody coup. Akali fled into the eastern mountains along with Mayym, Shen, Kennen, and a handful of other acolytes. Sadly, Tahno was not among them.

Zed’s transformation of the Kinkou into the merciless Order of Shadow was almost complete. But, as the new Eye of Twilight, Shen intended to rebuild what had been lost. They would return to the Kinkou’s three fundamental philosophies: the pure impartiality of Watching the Stars, the passage of judgment in Coursing the Sun, and the elimination of imbalance by Pruning the Tree. Even though they were now few, they would train neophytes to restore and grow their numbers once more.

When Akali came of age at fourteen, she formally entered her Kinkou training, determined to succeed her mother as the new Fist of Shadow.

She was a prodigious fighter, and mastered the kama and kunai—a handheld sickle and throwing dagger. Though she did not possess the magical abilities of many of her fellow acolytes, she proved to all she was worthy of the title, in time allowing her mother to step down and help mentor the younger neophytes.

But Akali’s soul was restless, and her eyes were open. Though the Kinkou and the Order of Shadow had come to an uneasy accord in the wake of the Noxian invasion of Ionia, she saw that her homeland continued to suffer. She questioned whether they were truly fulfilling their purpose. Pruning the Tree was meant to eliminate those who threatened the sacred balance... yet Shen would always urge restraint.

He was holding her back. All the mantras and meditations could quiet her spirit, but such platitudes would not defeat their adversaries. Her youthful precociousness turned to outright disobedience. She argued with Shen, she defied him, and she took down Ionia’s enemies her way.

In front of the whole order, she declared the impotence of the Kinkou, all its talk of spiritual balance and patience accomplishing little. Ionians were dying in the material realm, and that was the realm Akali would defend. She was trained as an assassin. She was going to be an assassin. She did not need the order anymore.

Shen let her go without a fight, knowing this was a path that Akali must walk alone. Perhaps that path would bring her back one day, but that would be for her to decide.

It is said that most inhabitants of the celestial realm see their home as a wondrous and vivid tapestry, woven with prismatic threads of purest starlight. However, for one prodigious entity, the intangible and everlasting beauty of this dimension is not seen, but heard—for Bard, a troubadour as enigmatic as he is eternal, the wondrous firmament is a symphony of mystic, ambrosial music.

In the beginning, Bard had drifted without purpose or perspective through a silent cosmos, but with a deep sense of anticipation that something miraculous would eventually come to fill it. Fate did not disappoint, and with the forging of the first stars, the silence was broken and the first rapturous notes of creation rang in Bard’s ear.

He traveled the swirling harmonies between the stars, along with the tiniest wisps of residual inspiration and thought left over from their birth. These semitonal, incomplete motes of energy—or meeps—were drawn to him whenever he added his own voice to the cosmic opus, forever ringing in one perfect accord.

This was not his masterpiece, yet he gloried in it all the same.

But after a measureless interval, a dissonance began to creep in. It was so small at first, Bard might have missed it, but the ever-doting meeps drew his attention to a failed dynamic shift here, an unexpected syncopation there, and even the growing absence of sound where, before, sound had been.

Bard scoured the celestial realm for clues, until he discovered the source. It was the most curious of things—a world with a song all of its own.

Driven by unknown magic, the music produced by Runeterra was as primitive, unevolved, and chaotic as the mortal beings that lived there… and yet it had an inherent beauty, like the rolling thunder of a storm, or the melodious knocking of wooden chimes in the wind that precedes it. Bard would have merely appreciated it for what it was, but unfortunately this particular song had gone far beyond a mere counterpoint to the celestial whole, and was becoming destructive. Something had to be done.

Touching down in the First Lands of Ionia, Bard and his attendant meeps crossed into the material realm. All at once, his ears became like eyes, and he fashioned himself a simple body from the trinkets and fabrics of a traveling shawm-player’s wagon, including a beguiling mask—circular, with three holes in the face.

He walked the world for an age, confusing and delighting those he encountered along the way, and found the state of things far more complex than he had first imagined. Many objects of wild and unpredictable power seemed to have made their way erroneously into Runeterra, and were disrupting the natural cosmic order of things. Casting his gaze back to the heavens, Bard deduced that some other power within the celestial realm was at work here… though to what end, he could not guess.

Regardless, he has taken to the role of caretaker, retrieving anything out of place and returning it to where it can do no further harm. Though this may be only the first step in bringing the universe back in tune, it may also be the only way this world can be saved from what lies beyond it.

And Bard is not blind to the future. He can see a great conflict approaching—one fought not in any single realm, but in all—and awaits the time when he must finally pick a side.

Of all the tales of the old Freljord that have somehow endured into the modern age, there is one—and one alone—that can chill the blood of even the hardiest Iceborn.

The Frostguard do not tell it. Many of them do not even know it, in full.

By decree of the Ice Witch Lissandra herself, to perpetuate this forbidden legend is heresy against the true faith, and carries the penalty of death for any who speak it aloud. In all the vast libraries of the Frostguard Citadel, only a single written account remains—and that was penned by her most trusted scribe, many thousands of years ago. Few indeed are those individuals across Runeterra who know the truth behind the legend, and Lissandra can count on the fingers of one hand those who were there in person and might dare to contradict her…

It was in the final, dark days of the War of the Three Sisters that Avarosa and Serylda finally marched their warriors up into the mountains, to face Lissandra before the walls of her own fortress. They would not serve the otherworldly masters that she had pledged them to. This would be an end to it.

The Ice Witch gestured to the armies they led, the great alliance that had finally brought these wild lands to heel. The mortal Iceborn were all but immune to the winter’s chill. The troll kings had roamed far across the tundra, amassing tremendous wealth from their conquests. Even the magnificent and terrible Balestriders, twisted far beyond their original form, moved now at the command of the Three.

All of this, Lissandra reminded her sisters, was because of the bargain she had made with the masters of the realm below—the beings she knew as Watchers. It was they who had revealed to her the primal secrets of the world. It was they who would have the final victory.

And it was then, at the height of this bitter confrontation, that the Watchers finally came to Runeterra.

The ground split open, swallowing thousands of warriors into the abyss beneath it, before the first of the dread things heaved itself up into existence. It was new to the material realm, bewildered by such notions as form and constancy, and began immediately to rail against them. In a foul riot of unchecked metamorphosis, it sprouted horns, and patches of fur, and its colossal tentacular limbs grew into jointed humanoid arms with fingers that clawed the bare rock of the mountainsides. Worst of all, other Watchers were following closely in its wake, wracked by horrifying transformations of their own.

It might be fair to assume there was a battle, that the Iceborn rallied behind Avarosa and Serylda to fight back the darkness—but in truth, it was Lissandra who ended it. She saw these abominations now for what they were, and knew what had to be done.

Summoning every last iota of the ancient magic around her, including that of her allies, she sacrificed everything to seal the rift-between-realms with True Ice, entombing the Watchers within it. Vast plumes of freezing vapor howled through the chasm, and those mortal warriors who managed to escape were driven to insanity by what they had witnessed.

This, then, is not only the legend of how Lissandra saved the world from destruction, but also the only first-hand account of the martyrdom of Avarosa and Serylda.

And may the Three have mercy upon all who read it.

Like most yordles, Tristana was always fascinated by the world beyond Bandle City. She traveled far and wide, full of wonder and enthusiasm for the varied places, people, and creatures she encountered. Using the hidden pathways that only yordles know, she explored the length and breadth of the material realm, remaining mostly unseen.

She witnessed such breathtaking sights as ice trolls migrating across the floes of the far north beneath kaleidoscopic auroras. She marveled as warships blasted each other to pieces in naval battles that churned the seas. She watched, awestruck, as great armies marched with unity and precision—incredibly strange concepts to a yordle!—across the endless sands to the south.

But Tristana’s carefree, wandering ways changed the day she witnessed the destruction of a bandlewood. These places are steeped in the magic of the gateways they grow around, giving yordles a safe haven from the world. Tristana, dozing in the dappled sunshine, was shaken awake as the trees around her began to burn and topple. A warband of armored marauders rampaged through the woodland with fire and axes, led by a sorcerer wreathed in dark energy.

Tristana hid in horror. The sorcerer focused his power upon the portal at the heart of the bandlewood, speaking one final utterance. Her ears still ringing with pain, Tristana watched the gateway collapse, never to be opened again. The ripples of that destruction were felt in Bandle City itself, causing great despair among the yordles.

Tristana had never experienced anything like the pain of this loss, or the guilt she felt for not acting. Never again would she allow such a terrible thing to happen. In that moment, she dedicated herself to become the guardian of all bandlewoods, and her fellow yordles.

Tristana had often marveled at how mortals protected the things that were dear to them. While she couldn’t comprehend their reasons to guard shiny metals, or walls of stone, she respected their methods, and decided to emulate them. Other yordles watched with curiosity as she took to marching around the borders of Bandle City stern-faced, and watching out for danger. She started calling her food “rations”, and set herself strict times for rest and relaxation.

But something was missing. In her travels, she had seen many powerful inventions, including the black powder cannons of Bilgewater. Inspired by them, she collected enough precious metal discs to commission a gun suited to her diminutive size.

With a wry smile, she named it Boomer.

Since then,Tristana has defended the bandlewoods from innumerable threats. In the jungles of the Serpent Isles, she intervened in a clash between the local Buhru people and treasure hunters from Valoran that was getting too close to a hidden portal, sending them all running for their lives after she leapt into their midst, Boomer roaring. And in the burning deserts at the edge of Shurima, she destroyed a Void-horror after it began consuming a secret bandlewood oasis, killing it with an explosive bomb down the gullet.

Tristana has become something of a legend in Bandle City, and recently, a number of yordles have started to imitate her, trying—and mostly failing—to copy her disciplined ways. Some have even had weapons mimicking Boomer constructed for them by the scrappy inventor Rumble, who is always seeking to win Tristana’s approval. While Tristana finds this all rather embarrassing, she has come to the conclusion that if they are going to defend the pathways to Bandle City, they had better do it properly. As such, she has started training these new recruits, and they have adopted a new moniker—the Bandle Gunners.

Nevertheless, Tristana can often be found out in the wilds on patrol by herself—simultaneously protecting the bandlewoods and also getting away from her new, and rather annoying, trainees.

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.