The darkin wars

The Ascended had given ancient Shurima a strength that ordinary armies could not easily oppose. Their service bound extraordinary lives to an imperial order, supplying that power with a purpose beyond individual ambition. Yet the war against the Void at Icathia left wounds that victory could not simply remove. Some god-warriors returned carrying damage that neither rank nor devotion could resolve.

When Shurima's capital fell and its emperor died, the surviving Ascended lost the authority around which their world had been organized. Rivalries spread into wars. Beings once honored as protectors and conquerors used their power against one another and against the people caught between them. The name darkin came to describe fallen god-warriors whose struggle no longer resembled the service that had first elevated them.

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Aatrox's history is one of the clearest personal paths through that collapse. He had fought with distinction before becoming part of a conflict whose violence seemed capable of consuming the world. Other darkin carried their own histories, ambitions and methods. Their common origin does not mean they acted as a permanently united people with one plan.

The effort to end their wars involved celestial intervention and mortal action. Twilight of the Gods follows one terrible confrontation, while other accounts describe the means by which surviving darkin were bound into their own weapons. This was more than disarmament. Consciousness endured inside a prison that deprived its captive of ordinary movement and agency.

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Imprisonment changed the shape of the threat instead of making every darkin cease to exist. A weapon could wait through centuries until a new bearer came near. Aatrox's struggle with the bodies he takes, Varus's complicated union with his hosts and Naafiri's awakening through a pack of hounds belong to much later stages of that history. They are consequences of the ancient wars, not scenes occurring immediately after Shurima's fall.

The chronology now moves from the end of an empire to the containment of powers that outlived it. Later kingdoms will rise in a world that still holds those weapons. For their inhabitants, an object discovered in a tomb can be an encounter with a disaster thought to belong to the distant past.