And with its people murdered, they had seen the city burned and its name hacked from every stele and obelisk that remained standing. Those same god-warriors had put the citizens to the sword in the wake of their emperor’s betrayal. None remembered that day, save the god-warriors who now led their hosts towards the city’s jutting ruins.
In a long-distant age, an event of great moment had taken place in the valley where the city would later be built. Upon a broken plinth stood two trunkless legs of stone, the cruel visage of a half-buried avian head lying in the sand beside them. Only its tallest towers remained above the dunes: broken spires that sang mournfully when the winds blew from the realms beyond the mountain.
The city and the bones of its people had long ago become one with the desert, and it was impossible to tell ash and bone from sand. Battle-hosts of a thousand warriors, each bearing bloody totems that told of the ancient lineages of the Sunborn Ascended who led them. They came to a dead city in the mountain’s shadow under cover of night. 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.Īnd, should such power fall into the wrong hands, the darkin will surely rise once more. With their leaders imprisoned forever, the rampaging hordes were broken and slain. 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.
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. The renegade god-warriors and the armies they raised were unstoppable, and entire nations were crushed between them. This conflict spread from Shurima to Valoran, and beyond. After centuries of uneasy alliance, they inevitably turned against one another-and so began the Great Darkin War. The scattered mortal populace named these new tyrants darkin, a whispered curse translating roughly in the old tongue as “the fallen.”īut even the darkin could not escape the sickness of soul that had come from fighting against the Void for so long. They taught themselves forbidden sorceries, and came to view themselves as the rightful inheritors of the world. 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. 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.Ĭenturies later, with the loss of mighty Azir at the very moment of his own Ascension, Shurima fell. 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. When the rebels of Icathia foolishly unleashed the Void in battle, Shurima’s defense was led, as ever, by the legendary Ascended.
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.