The Universe has been updated! Vel'Koz and Lissandra's biographies have been updated, and each have a new short story available!
Table of Contents
Lissandra, the Ice Witch
Lissandra now has an updated biography and short story on her Universe page!Lissandra Bio
"In a time long forgotten, before the sands birthed and then swallowed Shurima, beings of old magic freely walked Runeterra. The borders between the mortal realm and what lay beyond it were hotly contested.
Into this dangerous and volatile age, Lissandra and her sisters, Serylda and Avarosa, were born. Each sought to harness the powers at war, and each paid a terrible price. Attempting to command the heavens above them, Serylda lost her voice to the first twilight. Avarosa faced the twisting dark beneath the world, and was deafened by its emptiness, waiting to consume all creation.
It was Lissandra who stood against the wild magic of the mortal world itself. For this defiance, the savage claws of a primal god raked across her eyes, blinding her.
Though each sister had lost a part of themselves, it was on the frozen fields of Lissandra’s many battles that they were able to unite and prevail. Together, they were unstoppable… but even a bond of blood could only weather so much.
With her sight taken, Lissandra chose instead to walk in dreams. As she navigated the fitful visions of those around her, she realized only she could see the darkness below for what it was: the lingering abyss promised not only an ending, but infinity. It was death, both dangerous and full of potential. Unknown to her sisters, Lissandra struck a deal on their behalf with the god-like entities she had communed with—the Watchers would grant them near-immortality in exchange for preparing Runeterra for the coming of the Void.
The three sisters and their most powerful followers were named Iceborn. Those with this ability to withstand the worst of the numbing frost would be spared until the very end.
However, Lissandra’s sisters grew displeased. Avarosa argued that the only thing worse than death was servitude. Even Serylda bristled against what would become of the world they had fought so hard for. Caught in the middle, Lissandra tried to soothe her sisters’ concerns while appealing to the Watchers for more time, but the unknowable nothingness cared not for such platitudes.
The Void erupted into the mortal world in the far north, and with it, Lissandra’s hidden allegiance to the Watchers became undeniable. In that moment, her only choices were to let all the world be consumed, or to give up what she cared for most—Lissandra sacrificed her sisters and the allies they had gathered, entombing the Watchers beneath a glacial barrier of magical ice that could never be melted.
Lissandra soon discovered that even this elemental power was not enough. The monstrous beings she had frozen were merely slumbering, slowly tainting the True Ice around them into something darker. Now, they wandered through Lissandra’s dreams as easily as she had theirs, and always she would wake, terrified, professing her loyalty to the chilling eternity they promised.
Ever the survivor, she gathered her remaining followers to venerate her and her departed sisters. If True Ice would delay the inevitable end of all things, then they had to gather as much of it as they could find, and scour the frozen lands for any of Iceborn descent to join their cause.
Lissandra and the first among her Frostguard did everything in their power to rewrite history, seizing all records of what had truly happened… and yet, rumors and prophecies persisted in myth and song. It was whispered that Avarosa and Serylda would one day return to unite the disparate tribes, and so Lissandra had any who were hailed as their reincarnations quietly killed. Even she retreated into the shadows, periodically renewing herself with the powers she had been gifted.
Like the threat that lies trapped beneath the ice, Lissandra has never been able to completely control her sisters’ legends. Whether from guilt or arrogance, her failure to eradicate their legacy has manifested once more in two powerful Iceborn—one an idealist, the other a conqueror—and now, between them, they lead many tribes within the Freljord.
Lissandra watches them carefully, seeking any opportunity to pit them against one another, all the while redoubling her own efforts to lock away the terrible secrets she has buried deep under her citadel.
And she must hurry, for the ice is beginning to melt."
Short Story - The Eye in the Abyss
"Sigvar Half-Quiver knelt on one knee, head bowed, while the wind beyond the gates howled like the ice-wraiths of legend.
He was the Cleaver of Peaks, the Bloody Sword of Winterspike. He had taken the head of the warchief of the Chosen Children, Helmgar Cragheart, and had held the Valley of Spines alone, fighting the Mourncrow tribe to a standstill until reinforcements from the citadel arrived.
What’s more, Sigvar was Iceborn.
And yet—for all his deeds, all the honors he had earned under the Eye of Lissandra—as he knelt in the open gateway of the Frostguard Citadel, with the wind lashing and the unearthly banshee’s wail of the Howling Abyss whipping around him, he felt a flutter of trepidation at the task ahead."
[Check out the full story on the Universe!]
Vel'Koz, the Eye of the Void
Vel'Koz now has a new biography and short story on his Universe page!Vel'Koz Bio
"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."
Short Story - A Different Hunger
"With a kiss to my wife and resting my spear against my shoulder, I joined my fellows as we left the village. The morning was new, dawn stretching through the thick forests of Tokogol as the six of us made our way to the watch point by a worn dirt path. We were travelling light, as our vigil would only last until the next moon before another band of spearmen took our place. Tokogol shared borders with Noxus, and its increasing belligerence of late had stirred the house lords to ensure that all of their spears were honed.
Our journey was short and uneventful, a soldier’s dream. The better part of a half day’s march brought us within sight of the outpost, and we pointed as the signal fire was lit, welcoming us with a column of thin, white smoke. The mood among my comrades was light, the easy talk of bonded brothers and neighbors. Though our duty was to watch the frontier in search of any sign of it, war in Tokogol was a distant thought.
When we arrived, we found the gates to the stockade open and unbarred, yet not broken or forced. An odd feeling crept over us, like a chill dancing up our spines. I could see it in the others, just as surely as I felt it in myself.
We formed a tiny shield wall, two ranks of three men, and entered the stockade expecting to find slaughter—ruin and destruction, with signs of Noxus for all to see.
But we found none of this.
What we discovered was the picture of an outpost no different than any other. The fires had crackled down to embers beneath cooking pots that were still full. Clothes hung drying, and the lanterns were still on their poles from the night before. We looked at each other in alarm, in confusion. It was as if our comrades had simply disappeared.
“What could have happened here?” whispered Bel. Our wall straightened and broke as we searched the outpost for any sign of life.
“Could they have been captured?” asked Ulryk.
I approached a wall of the stockade. A stripe of the timber was burnt blacker than pitch. I reached toward it, and the barest touch of my fingertips sent it crumbling, revealing a crater of smooth wood underneath. The others found similar marks across the camp, though none of us could fathom how they had been made.
A cry sent us all back into a warrior’s crouch. “Come quick!”
It was Afron. We ran to him, finding him standing over a body.
“It’s Halryn,” he said, looking to us. “The tanner’s boy.”
The young man was pale, lying fetal on the ground. We saw no sign of battle on him, no blood or wounds.
I drew my knife. Sinking to my haunches, I brought the blade beneath Halryn’s nose. The day was cold, and shallow puffs of breath clouded the steel in a slow, stilted rhythm.
“He yet lives,” I said, reaching for his shoulder. We leapt away as soon as I’d rolled him onto his back.
Halryn’s eyes were open, yet there was nothing there. From what we could tell, he was conscious, but his right eye simply stared up at the sky, empty of light.
That was not what we had recoiled from.
“By the gods,” Ulryk breathed. Afron spat to avert evil, and we joined him.
Where Halryn’s left eye had been, only a dark pit remained. I had seen enough battle in my time to know the telltales of a spear or blade, but no weapon I knew could have made such a wound. It was too clean, too precise for battle’s disordered frenzy. No pain marked the boy’s face from the horrific injury.
“What could have done this to him?” Bel demanded. “Some beast? A plague?”
We shrank back from the body at the thought. “No,” Caer frowned, his hand straying to the satchel of herbs and poultices at his waist. “No sign of festering. This wasn’t disease.”
“Find the others,” ordered Bel. “Now.”
One by one, we found them. These were men we knew, men of our village who sold fish and hammered steel. All bore the same wound to their left eye, all reduced to the same catatonic state. They appeared almost serene, and all the more horrifying for it.
Afron looked to Bel. “What do we do?”
“We must give warning,” said Ulryk.
“Of what?” asked Caer. “We have no idea what is happening here.”
They argued. Voices clashed and overlapped. Above it all, I noted the smell of smoke in the air.
“Wait.”
The others stopped, looking back at me. I swallowed.
“If they are all in this state,” I pointed back to the signal fire behind us, “then who lit the beac—”
Ulryk was in the air before we knew what was happening. A blinding flash stole my sight, but I glimpsed a huge, darkened shape against it. Oaths, prayers and curses filled the air from my comrades’ lips. They were silenced by a crack like a bullwhip, followed by an overwhelming, fizzing shriek.
When I could see clearly again, I was on the ground.
I looked down to see my legs splayed, broken. Other warriors, my brothers and friends, lay staring up at the sky above.
I heard only one other voice, and turned. I could only watch as Afron, a youth of barely sixteen, struggled beneath the monster. Bathed in harsh violet light, he writhed as one of its appendages sank into his skull through his eye. His screams stopped as he became a mere husk, like all the others.
Then the monster turned its baleful gaze in my direction.
In an instant, it was looming over me. I looked up into that single, swollen eye, and sensed a hunger beyond imagining. A hunger not of flesh, but something far deeper. My soul teetered on the edge of this abyss, its merciless hunger pulling…
No.
I am Hennis Kydarn, a warrior and a spear of Tokogol. I refused to give it the satisfaction of my cries, even as its tentacle knifed down through my eye. There was no pain—
—as I work. The analysis can inflict physical pain, should I desire it, but that is not critical here. I have learned much of pain, and its uses.
This one’s information is precious, as all knowledge is. A settlement, interactions, castes.
A particular female of the species, and offspring… This one resists my analysis of those, but it is a simple thing to overcome.
With nothing more to consume, I travel here, to disseminate what I have collected.
The rift beneath me is a conduit for information to be passed into the true realm. The creatures that inhabit this world have designated our domain as the Void. Such curious poetry these entities weave—a curiosity that illustrates how far my task is from completion.
A universe of knowledge surrounds me, of great power and distant lands, and I shall collect it all. I offer this information, now, and all of the rest to come.
Accept.
Consume.
Learn. "
Art
Here are each of the art pieces from the new short stories:
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