The story of the Void has finally been revealed

Thanks to the upcoming release of Kai’Sa, we’re getting spoiled with a load of new League of Legends lore. All of is, of course, centered around the mysterious Void. Players have been looking to get their hands on some sweet Void info for years now, and we finally have its history.

Before the Void was a monstrous pit, it was an ancient civilization known as Icathia. This name might sound familiar to you if you’ve heard of Kog’Maw’s passive, Icathian Surprise. Riot released a lengthy short story telling the tale of Icathia’s fall through the eyes of Axamuk Var-Choi Kohari Icath’or, one of its ancient citizens.

The story starts with hope and joy, as Icathia has begun an uprising against the Shuriman empire. Icathian soldiers murder their Shuriman handlers in the street and young warriors march for freedom. But while the spirits are high, tales of the Shuriman god-warriors, presumably the Nasuses and Renektons of the world, would shake the warriors to their core.

As the Icathians set up their summit, our hero begins to suspect something might be wrong. The Icathians have some kind of secret weapon at their disposal. But it feels evil and disgusting to our narrator. But after generations of oppression, the desperation of the Icathians outweighs any price.

The battle began as the Shurimans arrives on the scene. The Shurimans not only had the numbers, but also a host of god warriors. Nine, to be exact. But while the Icathians won the first attack, the god-warriors quickly entered the fray and ruined any chance at hope.

But then the Icathians used their secret weapon.

Riot Games

The Icathian priests called forth an unknown power that ripped the fabric of the universe asunder. Purple light and evil tentacles ripped out of the earth and tore through the army of the Shurimans. God-warriors or normal soldiers, the Void did not discriminate in its destruction. But the power was uncontrollable, and took life on both sides.

As one god-warrior sought to end the communion between dimensions, our hero fired an arrow through its skull. This singular shot doomed the whole of Runeterra to the plague of the Void.

The Void began to swallow the battlefield and the ruins of Icathia entirely. As our hero and all of his soldiers are swallowed, we see a short glimpse as he begins to lose everything that made him who he was. By the end, he remembers nothing and has become a mindless husk.

Riot Games

This story reveals extremely little about the nature of the Void or its true history. What it instead tells us is that the Void has always been and always will be. That we did not create the Void, we simply opened a portal to it in our own world. The nature of the Void itself is one of death. It swallows all life around it and chews matter up into ill-formed beasts.

We have three human champions that have entered the void and survived, but none of them have ever returned the same. The Void is an evolution chamber that solves for problems we didn’t know we had. It has great and terrible potential that seems eternally locked inside an impossible maze.

The only other things we know about the Void comes from the region’s bio, which reads:

Screaming into existence with the birth of the universe, the Void is a manifestation of the unknowable nothingness that lies beyond. It is a force of insatiable hunger, waiting through the eons until its masters, the mysterious Watchers, mark the final time of undoing.

To be a mortal touched by this power is to suffer an agonizing glimpse of eternal unreality, enough to shatter even the strongest mind. Denizens of the Void realm itself are construct-creatures, often of only limited sentience, but tasked with a singular purpose—to usher in total oblivion across Runeterra.

The suggestion that the Watchers are the masters of the Void is an interesting one that, as usual, asks more questions than answers them. The Void remains the most mysterious of League’s various mysteries.

Perhaps the story of the Watchers will lead us to the Void answers we seek.