Every Ionian Child Grows Up on the Tale of the Devoted Shrine Maiden
Xin Zhao demands to know what is reaching into his head, and the Kinkou answer by taking apart Ionia’s best-loved bedtime story.
Xin Zhao arrives at the Kinkou stronghold of Koeshin already shaking. He has watched Demacia fall inside his own skull, more than once, and he will not walk another step into Ionia until somebody tells him who is doing it to him.
But I must know, what kind of enemy can reach inside my mind, and taunt me with scenes from my own worst nightmares? Speak now, or I shall go no further.
Xin Zhao, Trials of Twilight: The Truth, on RuneGrove
He is an outsider and the Kinkou do not brief outsiders. 
Yunara vouches for him anyway. They fought the demonkin together, she says, and his heart is good, so the order tells him the thing it has never told the country it protects.
The Tale of the Devoted Shrine Maiden is a wholesome fable every Ionian child knows. It was never a fable. Yunara was the Shrine Maiden, she lived it, and the version Ionia recites has the ending cut off.
It is certain Ionia has a much longer and richer history than any living soul could claim to know. Indeed, in the more remote mountain passes, the landscape is still littered with evidence of great wars from ages past—but instead of clearing the ruins, the Ionians choose to respect what remains, even if they no longer fully understand what it represents.
Ionia: An Ancient And Respected History, on RuneGrove
That habit is what made the cover story hold. A country trained to revere a ruin without interrogating it will let a story sit on top of a war for centuries. The truth the fable is hiding is not a scandal about a battle. It is about who actually won that battle, what he asked for the moment it ended, and the fact that the Kinkou answered by posting one woman outside his cell and telling everyone else a nicer version.
A country trained to revere a ruin without interrogating it will let a story sit on top of a war for centuries.
Koeshin Was the Last Kinkou Stronghold, and What Saved It Walked In Wearing a Darkin’s Face
The order was losing until an invader changed sides, and the technique that ended the war came out of Shurima with him.
Yunara narrates the real account herself, and it opens with the order losing. The Darkin had spilled out of the world-before, gathered followers, and turned Ionia on itself. Koeshin was the last stronghold the Kinkou still held, and it was close to going.
This was no fairy tale. Our people were dying. We did not know why the Darkin came here, but they had amassed many followers, and set Ionia at war with itself. He told us his name was Zaahen. His kind were once praised as heroes, noble paragons of their sun-empire. And yet, he had witnessed their fall from the light, into darkness.
Yunara, Trials of Twilight: The Truth, on RuneGrove
Zaahen was one of them. He was also sickened by them: by the time he reached Koeshin he had already killed several of his own brothers and sisters. Yunara is blunt about what that cost him, and about what the Kinkou made of it: “He would do so again, if needed, though each death broke his immortal heart a little more. There was something remarkably human in that.” He offered an alliance and the Eye of Twilight sealed the pact.
For nearly three years the order fought god-warriors alongside a god-warrior, using arcane knowledge he had carried out of Shurima, and that knowledge is the reason the Darkin ended up inside their own weapons rather than dead. The binding technique Runeterra still lives with came from the enemy.
The Kinkou are the self-appointed keepers of Ionia’s sacred balance. Their acolytes walk both Runeterra and the spirit realm, mediating conflicts between them and, when necessary, intervening by force.
Ionia: The Kinkou, on RuneGrove
Self-appointed is the whole problem. Nobody elected the Kinkou keeper of what Ionia is allowed to remember, and our encyclopedia entry for the order describes the same arrangement without blinking: an ancient organization that appoints itself keeper of the balance and intervenes by force when harmony cannot be restored any other way. An order with that job description and a victory it cannot explain has exactly one move available, and it took it.
Encyclopedia entry: the Kinkou Order
Master Lao Told Them the Fallen Ones Could Not Be Fought, Then Took Her Into the War Anyway
Her own journal records the kill that marked her master, and the warning about immortals he did not take.
Yunara kept a journal through all of it. What survives of it is a stack of damaged fragments, and two of them explain why she, of everyone in the order, would later agree to stand where she stands.
It is Master Lao I think of most—and he’d probably laugh at me for saying so. His teachings, though offered sparingly, punctuated our routine with deeper meaning.
He warned that confronting the Fallen Ones themselves was utterly futile. Even their mortal followers were not to be taken lightly.
Sadly, his words did little to dissuade those who heard not a warning, but a challenge—and in seeking victory, found only death. Zai tah’lo. I only wish he had followed his own advice.
Yunara, fragment #166, her biography on RuneGrove
Fragment #98 is the night it caught up with him. She spots a servant of the Fallen in Lao’s blind spot, slips through the shadows and kills the man, and turns to find her master proud of her for about one second.
As Lao turned, his face held a proud smile—one that shifted to horror when he spotted the symbol on the dead man’s tunic.
“The blood… She will come for us.”
He tore my gloves away, and wiped them on his tattered robes. His eyes told me to run.
And then I saw her. Lao stood to face our immortal foe, but was bound instantly.
Yunara, fragment #98, her biography on RuneGrove
The scroll is destroyed from there, and the margin picks up where the parchment stops. The translator will not name the immortal, but he is happy to name the magic, and he is even happier about who he is naming it to: “Rest of scroll damaged beyond legibility, but description above feels evocative of hemomancy, I’m certain you would agree.”
Hold onto that sentence. What the fragment establishes without any guessing is the lesson: Lao gave a warning about immortals, ignored it himself, and was taken apart in front of the acolyte he trained. Everything she agrees to afterwards is downstream of that.
Her Assignment During the Alliance Was to Learn How to Kill the Ally
She swore to serve no false gods, then spent three years fighting beside one and learning how to put him down.
The Kinkou did not trust Zaahen. They used him, which is different, and they built themselves a contingency out of a person. Yunara held the seat of Fist of Shadow, and the seat came with a brief.
Her vows are in fragment #104, written out in full because she had them by heart before she could have understood them. Her parents handed her to the order as a child.
- I will follow the Eye’s guidance and turn to the Heart for wisdom.
- I will vanquish all who disrupt balance.
- I will prune the tree of weakness and blight.
- I will serve no false gods, nor kanmei.
- I will not allow my feelings to prevent what must be done.
Yunara, the vows of the Fist of Shadow, fragment #104, on RuneGrove
The first vow points at 
Shen’s seat, the Eye of Twilight, and his Legends of Runeterra card carries the doctrine underneath it: “Like hands clasped, the mortal and spirit realms intertwine...” The fourth vow is the one that will not sit still. She swore to serve no false gods, and the war she is remembered for was won standing beside one.
She still snaps about the name people gave that war.
The War of the False Kanmei—a name bestowed by those who know nothing of which they speak.
Yunara, in-game voice line, on RuneGrove
She never explains the objection. What our own records do show is that the popular name brands the enemy false gods, that her own oath uses the same word, and that the order beat those gods by making a pact with one of them. A name like that does not survive contact with the archive, which may be exactly why the archive stopped being public.
He Asked for the Cell. She Volunteered for the Corridor.
Zaahen requested his own imprisonment, and both champions’ biographies describe the same door without either of them opening it.
Here is the beat the fable removes. The war ends, the Darkin are in their weapons, and the ally who made that possible looks at what winning has done to him and asks to be treated as one of the enemy.
When the war was won, Zaahen feared what he was becoming and asked to be bound like the rest, hidden away in the Temple of Twilight, which was cast into the spirit realm. Yunara pledged to stand watch over it for all time.
Trials of Twilight: The Truth, on RuneGrove
Grand Master Bhinan sent her off with a line that reads less like a blessing than a transfer of liability, and Yunara wrote it down because it never stopped bothering her.
“You go now into a place where few can follow. From here, it is you who must determine what is to be pruned. Deliver your judgments as if they were my own.”
I knew then that we would never speak again, in this realm or the next.
Yunara, fragment #104, on RuneGrove
What makes this the strongest scene Riot has written for either of them is that both biographies describe the same threshold, from opposite sides, and neither one crosses it. Zaahen, sealed inside the weapon that binds him, spends his eternity listening to her walk past.
Beyond its confines, I sense movement: footsteps echoing through the temple halls. The tread of an ally… my old friend, ever vigilant. She often comes close, or so it seems, but never crosses the threshold.
Does she think to free me? She cannot, she must not. She knows as well as I that Darkin and divine battle within me.
Zaahen, his biography on RuneGrove
Her fragment #45 is the same moment written from the corridor. A fight with an azakana drags her toward the entrance and she treats getting close to the door as the incident worth logging: “the skirmish brought me perilously close to the temple’s entrance. Until that moment, I had avoided coming so near. I returned to my chambers to meditate.”
She often comes close, or so it seems, but never crosses the threshold.
— Zaahen, his RuneGrove biography, read it
Riot has already printed the building this happens in, more or less. The Legends of Runeterra landmark The Veiled Temple is a temple standing inside the Spirit Realm whose entire function is passing weapons through the veil to somebody on the other side: “It is here, in the Spirit Realm, that Alune communes with her brother Aphelios.” Yunara’s temple is the inversion. It is in the same realm, it also contains a weapon with a person inside it, and the whole point is that nothing comes back out.
The Post Cannot Be Finished, Which Is Why It Became a Career
Spirits return when their bodies are destroyed, so the watch has no end state, and her journal is the record of what that does to a person.
The reason this is a permanent posting and not a job with an end date is in our encyclopedia entry for the Spirit, the deathless family the Temple of Twilight now sits inside.
Death does not end a spirit. When the physical form a spirit inhabits is destroyed, that spirit passes back into the Spirit Realm and later returns, resuming whatever purpose it had been pursuing.
This makes their conflicts long-running affairs measured against a scale no mortal opponent can match.
Runeterra encyclopedia: Spirit, on RuneGrove
Nothing on that side of the veil can be cleared. Kill it and it comes back and picks up where it left off, which is why the Kinkou answer was a rota rather than a victory, and why Yunara’s job description is a loop.
Before the war
Given to the order
Her parents entrust her to the Kinkou as a child and she learns the vows by heart.
The war
Master Lao is bound
She kills a servant of the Fallen, Lao sees the symbol on the tunic and tells her to run.
Nearly three years
The Kinkou fight beside Zaahen
The Eye of Twilight seals a pact with an invader-god and the Darkin go into their weapons.
After the war
She gives up the Fist of Shadow
The role is relinquished to another and she swears to guard the Temple of Twilight.
Centuries
The perimeter circle
Thirteen azakana in one morning, and another full circle added to her daily duties.
Now
The trials open
Xin Zhao reaches Koeshin, and the Tale of the Devoted Shrine Maiden comes apart.
Her journal is the log of that loop, and it is the best thing in her canon. Fragment #45 opens on a morning she mistakes for weather.
I mistook the scuttling of azakana across the roof for rain today. Leaving my quarters, thirteen awaited me outside the temple. Most were dispatched quickly, but two proved more difficult.
One clung to the temple’s side with its grotesque maw. Its teeth shattered against the Aion Er’na—I knocked its shriveled remains off the cliff.
But I do not fear the dark. It felt good to face a real challenge again.
Yunara, fragment #45, on RuneGrove
Fragment #201 is what the years do. She has started measuring herself in repetitions, the way anyone does when the work never changes: a martial pattern that once took sixteen invocations of the Twilight Orison now takes eleven, and she cannot tell whether that is the spirit waters or the cold. The entry ends on the only homesick line she allows herself, which is about a hot spring.
With endless time to train, I have begun experimenting with non-combat uses for the Aion Er’na. I can now dance with them in perfect synchronization, and use them as stepping stones between my chambers and the temple.
Still, I miss the hot springs of Koeshin.
Yunara, fragment #201, on RuneGrove
Magic suffuses every part of Ionia—its people, its history, and most of all the land itself. All aspects of life there hang in a balance, with still so much left to be discovered and explored.
Ionia: The First Lands, on RuneGrove
That balance has a staffing cost, and Legends of Runeterra has been printing it for years. Shadow Flare states the failure mode in one line: “When the flows of magic are diverted from their balanced state, they surge from the spirit world into the mortal realm--often with startling results.” Kalista is what happens when the person holding the line stops being a person: “In life, she was a general, a protector, a hero. But as flesh gave way, she was left with naught but the blazing fires of retribution--an undying spirit of vengeance.” The rest of the Spirit family in our card database keeps making the same point from different regions.
The Azakana Were Bait, and She Filed the Evidence Herself
The demon surge was a coordinated lure, and her own journal recorded the buildup years before anyone read it as one.
The demons at her door were not an infestation. Somebody sent them, and the point was never to beat her. The point was to get her to walk.
The azakana spirits were a distraction, to lure me away from my post. They mean to free Zaahen! This is not the Kinkou’s fight alone. The Darkin are a threat to all the peoples of this world.
Yunara, Trials of Twilight: The Truth, on RuneGrove
Go back to fragment #45 and the trap is visible in her own handwriting, years early. She noticed the escalation. She wrote it down. She got the cause exactly backwards.
Of late, there has been far more akana activity in general, and I fear his power attracts the restless.
I have added another full circle of the perimeter to my daily duties.
Yunara, fragment #45, on RuneGrove
She read a coordinated operation as a side effect of her prisoner leaking, and she responded by walking one more lap. The first line of that entry is her mistaking the demons for rain, and the last is her adding a lap. She had the intelligence that would have saved the post, and she filed it under weather.
She had the intelligence that would have saved the post, and she filed it under weather.
Fragment #206 is the other warning she could not decode. A vision arrives mid-meditation, inside a temple she notes is warded against intrusion including dreams: she is on a mountain chasing the Fan and its followers, and then the walls are around her, “alive and seething,” and where her companion stood there is a stranger in foreign robes. Her translator flags it as the only vision referenced across all 207 fragments.
Two flagged anomalies, both logged, neither escalated. That is what a guard post looks like when nobody above it is still reading the reports.
The Door Only Opens for Someone Who Puts Their Weapons Down
The trials strip your armor at the door, then run your own memories at you with a lie stitched in.
Xin Zhao decides the Darkin are everyone’s problem and asks to go in. The Trials of Twilight have an entry condition, and it is the opposite of the one games normally use: they reject anyone who arrives in force or with a dulled spirit. So the Seneschal of Demacia takes his plate off, and accepts a woodweaver’s sapling on the way in.
In the northeastern mountains, the monastery of Hirana has long been a sanctuary for those seeking to better understand their connection to the spirit realm.
Ionia: The Great Monasteries, on RuneGrove
Riot has printed this gate check before. Arbiter of the Peak is the Targon version and its flavor text is almost a design brief: “The Arbiter is the mountain’s final test, for only the guardian sees beyond the climber’s deeds, and into their spirit.” A gate that reads intent rather than gear is a genuinely awkward thing to build and a genuinely interesting thing to play.
What waits past it is not a dungeon. It is his own history with a lie edited into it. He is put back aboard the Viscero, made to fight Bo Yang, and told the thing about himself he has spent a life not saying: the defiant blow that made his name got the rest of the crew, old fishermen and deckhands, sent to the Reckoning pits. Then the trial tries a softer memory and overreaches.
“You and I were worthless to them, cut loose as soon as we landed in the capital. But the rest of the crew were sent straight to the Reckoning pits. Old fishermen and deckhands. Your moment of defiance got them all killed.”
“No. This was not how it happened. He was never so unkind.”
Bo Yang and Xin Zhao, Trials of Twilight: The Warning, on RuneGrove
The illusion peels and the real speaker steps forward, and it is not subtle about who it is: “Who are you to defy the Sunborn god-warriors of Shurima!? We who vanquished the Void itself! This world was ours. We will take it back.” Then the trial offers him a Darkin weapon as the answer, and a second voice cuts through the dark and tells him not to take it.
He and Yunara were each meant to face the trials alone. Both of them heard the same voice, and it was the prisoner’s. Zaahen did not guide anyone through the test. He warned a stranger off the weapons, which is the same warning he has been giving about himself for centuries.
She Left the Corridor Chasing a Decoy and Walked Into a Century She Does Not Recognize
Her trailer is a guard coming off shift, and her voice lines are an audit of the order that left her on it.
The champion trailer is the sound of a guard finally coming off shift, and its first line is the vow, not a greeting.
Watch it on our page for the Yunara Champion Trailer
She barely speaks in it, and the two lines that bracket the transcript do all the work: “The time has come to prune the tree” at the top, “I mustn’t take a single breath for granted” at the end. In between, the woman who has been holding a door for centuries walks out into a country she has to be reintroduced to. Her in-game line for that is flatter and worse: “Much has changed, and I do not understand why. Not truly.”
Situated at the heart of the continent, the Placidium is one of Ionia’s most sacred places. Many have journeyed here to study at renowned schools, or meditate in its wild, magical gardens. Undoubtedly, this was why it became such a tempting target for the invading armies of Noxus…
Ionia: The Placidium of Navori, on RuneGrove
She finds out about that war the way you find out about a fire at your old house, and her reaction is not grief. It is an audit. “The First Lands fought off the Darkin… so how did we nearly fall to your empire?!” she asks the first Noxian she meets, and her verdict on the order that posted her is shorter: “The Kinkou Order are paralyzed by indecision once more.”
When the prisoner she was assigned to kill is on her side
Yunara: “It’s you! There is much for us to discuss… but not here, not now.”
Yunara: “Some things stand the test of time.”
And when he is not
Yunara: “Your warning now rings true, Zaahen; you have become my enemy.”
Yunara: “Your fetid kin walk among us once more. I did not expect to see you walk beside them…!”
Yunara: “I pray you find the peace you longed for.”
Yunara: “I can weep for you no longer.”
Reporting back to the Heart of the Tempest, several centuries late
Yunara: “What providence that we have been reunited after— Kennen, how long have I been away…?”
Yunara: “What has become of the Kinkou? Why does the Heart of the Tempest now stand still?”
Yunara: “I promised I would stop you if you lost your way…”
Voice lines quoted verbatim from our own database, audio hosted on RuneGrove. Tap to play.
Shen gets “Perhaps your wayward protégé was right to call you a spineless coward.” 
Akali, who walked away from the seat Yunara herself had to give up, gets “To serve no one is to let your self-importance master you, Akali.” 
Kennen just gets asked how long she has been gone. She is not sentimental about any of them, and she is not certain about herself either.
I know not if I am still fit to prune the tree. If too much is cut, a tree weakens—nonetheless, my vow is unshakeable.
Yunara, in-game voice line, on RuneGrove
One of her walking lines is the best summary of her own situation anyone has written, and she does not appear to notice it applies to her.
Myth is to culture, as conflict is to life. They reveal what people have deemed most important.
Yunara, in-game voice line, on RuneGrove
What a Game Would Have to Build Here
Six standard quest beats, each one already written and each one with its polarity reversed.
Yunara does not point at a class. She points at a questline, and the useful thing about it is that almost every beat runs the standard shape backwards.
| Quest beat | The usual MMO version | What Riot already wrote here |
|---|---|---|
| The hook | A stranger in the hub asks you to look into strange creatures near the shrine. | Thirteen azakana on a temple roof, logged by the guard for weeks as ordinary bad weather. |
| The escort | Walk the NPC to safety and collect their thanks. | She covers her master’s blind spot, and the kill she makes for him is what marks him for death. |
| The gate | An item level check on the instance portal. | A trial that rejects anyone who arrives in force, so the knight takes his armor off at the door. |
| The dungeon | A ruin full of things to kill. | Your own memories, replayed accurately until the moment somebody edits one. |
| The boss | Kill the thing sealed in the vault. | The thing sealed in the vault would like to stay there, and warns you off the weapon that would free it. |
| The reward | Loot and a title. | The truth, plus the discovery that somebody outside the country already has a copy. |
Read down the right column and the design problem announces itself. A questline built this way cannot be soloed for loot, because the loot is information, and it cannot end in a kill, because the kill is the failure state. Zaahen asked for the cell. Freeing him is what the enemy wants. The only win condition on offer is that the door stays shut and somebody keeps standing next to it, which is a live-service structure rather than a chapter: a place on the map that has to be maintained, and an NPC whose entire characterization is the maintenance.
Ionia is the obvious home for it. The boundary between realms is thinnest there, our entry for the Spirit Realm puts the Kinkou teaching plainly, and the seat of the order at the Temple of Koeshin is a building Riot has already described and drawn. Riot has announced nothing about questing, zones, or systems in the MMO, and has shown no gameplay at all. What it has done is write, animate and voice a complete quest chain for a region that any Runeterra MMO would have to build anyway.
Somebody Has Already Read All 207 Fragments, and He Is Not Ionian
The journal survives as a commissioned translation, and the margin notes are addressed to Lord Vladimir.
Now the part that makes the whole cover-up look like a mistake rather than a mercy. Yunara’s journal does not survive in a Kinkou vault. It survives as a commissioned translation, and the cover note is addressed to a client.
[For your attention: a series of damaged manuscript fragments, recovered from the old ruins of Koeshin during restoration of the upper promontory. Please advise on how these should be archived.]
[Lord Vladimir—I have completed the re-translation as requested. Your suspicions regarding the previous translator’s incompetence were well-founded.]
The opening notes on Yunara’s biography on RuneGrove
That is who the aside about hemomancy in fragment #98 was written for. Every square bracket in that biography is somebody working for him, and the notes identify the Kinkou leadership of the period by name, gloss the archaic root language behind the relic, place the practice of giving children to temples in a later war, and read her descriptions for magical signatures. It is not an archive. It is a target file, and the last note in it is the translator giving advice.
If it is the being housed inside the temple, it appears you share a common enemy. I see nothing else to suggest it would retaliate against you for past actions against its brethren—in my view, your caution toward the host you were cultivating may have been… excessive.
The closing annotation on Yunara’s biography on RuneGrove
Read that against what the fable was for. The Kinkou softened the record so a wounded country could heal, and it worked: Ionia got a bedtime story and stopped asking who won the war. It did not stop anyone else. The fable worked on exactly one audience, and it was not the one that needed fooling.
The fable worked on exactly one audience, and it was not the one that needed fooling.
So the finale of this questline is not the door. It is the archive. Somebody funded a re-translation because the first one was not good enough, has read every fragment the guard ever wrote, has been told her prisoner is unlikely to hold a grudge, and is being advised that his caution was excessive. The Kinkou spent centuries making sure Ionia could not answer a question nobody in Ionia was asking. The one person we can confirm asked it did not need their permission, and he was not standing in the corridor.
None of this is confirmed as anything. Riot has not said a word about how the MMO handles quests, and the Trials of Twilight arc was written for League. It is still the most complete piece of quest design Riot has published in years, and it is sitting in Ionia with the ending already written.
Would You Open It?
If a Runeterra MMO put the Temple of Twilight in front of you, with the guard’s own journal in your bag, would you open the door?
Read Next
Sources: Yunara’s and Zaahen’s biographies, the Trials of Twilight motion comics, the Yunara Champion Trailer, our Ionia region galleries, the Runeterra encyclopedia entries for the Spirit and the Kinkou Order, and our Legends of Runeterra card database. A RuneGrove lore read.
